


2.12 Mabel and Teek's Excellent Adventure

by William_Easley



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: F/M, Fantasy, Humor, Labyrinth - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 15:36:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11603601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley
Summary: It's just a simple baby-sitting chore. Surely nothing can go wrong--no, wait, Mabel's the babysitter. Of course something can go wrong.





	2.12 Mabel and Teek's Excellent Adventure

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Gravity Falls or its characters, the property of the Walt Disney Company and Alex Hirsch. I write only for fun, because I love Alex Hirsch's creation and his people and, I hope, to entertain other fans; I make no money from my fanfictions.

**Mabel and Teek's Excellent Adventure**

**By William Easley**

**(July 4, 2014)**

* * *

**Chapter 1**

**From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _Friday, July 4: It's only seven, and I've been up for an hour and a half. Wendy came over super early for our exercise and run—we got up the nerve to take our nature route, but we gave Moon Trap Pond a wide berth. And we briefly visited the Bill Cipher effigy, but he didn't seem to be at home._

_Then, darn it, Wendy had to go home. The Shack's closed today for the holiday, and Soos is planning a great big cookout and barbecue for anybody who wants to drop in. The Museum will have an open house, free admission, but I guess the gift shop won't open at all, unless Grunkle Stan comes over to run the register. Which he probably will . . .. "Never lose an opportunity to separate a mark from a buck" is his motto._

_Anyway, Wendy and her family are going to visit one of her aunts, who's recovering from gall-bladder surgery, and that will take until about three or four o'clock this afternoon, so we don't get to hang out together. I've volunteered to help Soos and Melody set up everything for the cookout, which means setting up a whole bunch of tables and folding chairs._

_Normally I guess Teek would do the grilling, but Soos gave him the day off (with pay, same as Wendy), and he hired an older couple, the Willetts, to cook just for the day. They're retired, but they used to own and cook at a restaurant over in Mossy Run, and Soos says they're great._

_Mabel is so proud of herself. She's babysitting Little Soos all day long. She has the whole kit—diaper bag, cooler bag with three or four bottles of milk (Melody's milk. I didn't ask how they got it into the bottles, and I don't want to know), toys, the whole bit._

_"Sis, are you sure about this?" I asked her._

_"Brobro," she said in that I-know-what-I'm-doing tone of hers that means she doesn't, "I'm fourteen! I am a competent care-giver for babies!"_

_"Should I remind you of the Vernet baby and the bulldozer incident?" I asked. The Vernets are down-the-street neighbors of ours in Piedmont, and back in the spring they had asked Mabel to sit with their three-year-old, Chimber (long story behind that name, never mind) just long enough for them to go have dinner and see a movie. Afterwards, the authorities estimated damages at close to fourteen thousand dollars._

_"Pffft!" Mabel said. "That was three months ago! I'm WAY more mature now. Besides, they shouldn't have left the keys in the thing."_

_"Don't take Little Soos away from the Shack," I advised her._

_"Don't worry, bro-o-mine! Teek is coming over to help me keep an eye on Soosie!"_

_I felt a little better. Teek is a nice guy, and he's responsible. So Soos and I moved tables, unfolded the legs, set them up, and taped down butcher-paper covers—three layers on each table so when they got messy we could just peel down to the next one—and unfolded folding chairs. There were five tables and a total of eight chairs at each. "What if we get more than forty at a time?" I asked._

_Soos shrugged cheerfully. "Got it covered, dawg. Melody dug out, like, a dozen vinyl tablecloths, right? So we'll make the front yard the picnic lawn! That is, like, using our resources. Also our brains. High five!"_

_We were halfway through the job when Teek came biking up. He hopped off and offered to help, but Soos shrugged. "Eh, got it covered, T.K. But thanks, man! Mabel's inside. She's watchin' over Little Soos, and you can help her do that."_

_"OK," Teek said. He gave me a little shrug that said clearly, "I just talked to Mabel on the phone about this!"_

_"You sticking around for the fireworks at the lake this evening?" I asked Teek._

_"Uh. Yeah, I guess so. If I can catch a ride."_

_"No worries, man!" Soos said. "Long as I got a truck, you're, uh. You—huh. ALMOST had a slogan, dawg."_

_"As long as I got a truck, you're in luck," I offered._

_Soos stared at me. "Dude! You can't drive. You're like, a year off from a learner's permit!"_

_"Oh. Well, in that case, you can use the slogan," I said._

_Soos did an air-pump. "Yes! It's all falling into place!"_

_Teek grinned at me, waved, and went into the Shack. I guess I shouldn't worry. Between the two of them, Teek and Mabel should be able to handle one little baby. Well, big baby—he IS Soos's son. But still . . . I'm sure it'll be fine._

_Reasonably sure._

* * *

The first hour or so went fine. Little Soos played with foam-rubber blocks, practiced creeping—you couldn't yet call it a crawl, more like a floor-swim—took a brief nap, got a diaper change, had some milk, burped some of it back up, you know—normal baby stuff.

Grunkle Stan showed up around eight and came in to see his godson. "He's gonna grow up to be a big one!" he said, raising Little Soos way up over his head and then down again, making him giggle. Little Soos, that is. Stan rarely giggled.

Mabel had gone to change her sweater—she had been holding Little Soos to burp him when the splootch of milk had glurched up on her shoulder—and she came back grinning. "He likes that, Grunkle Stan!"

"Yeah, you know, you did, too when you were just a baby. Dipper, though, it scared the dickens outa him."

"Huh?" Mabel asked, tilting her head. "You saw us when we were babies?"

"Kiddo, didn't I tell ya? I was there the day you two were born! 'Course your parents thought I was my brother Stanford. Man, I'll never forget that day. Dipper nearly died."

"Huh?"

"Yeah, he was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Came out blue. They were gonna put him on oxygen, but I gave him a little bit of mouth-to-mouth—don't look shocked, I had the courses—an' he started to breathe on his own. Close call, though."

"Oh, wow."

Stan shrugged. "Yeah, an' I visited your family over the next year, I guess, two-three times. Then I got real busy and the next year just made it down once. And then, well, not at all. I mean, your parents were so happy with you I kinda felt like I was intrudin', so—didn't see you again until you were twelve."

Teek took Little Soos from Grunkle Stan, and Little Soos started playing his own personal favorite game of Stick-My-Fingers-Up-Your-Nose.

"We were so lucky that we got to come to the Shack," Mabel said.

Stan laughed. "Luck, shm—uh, I mean, luck had nothin' to do with it. Your parents were worried, mainly 'cause of Dipper—I talked to your mom on the phone that May, an' she said that in the summer he did nothin' but read books. She wanted him to get out in the fresh air. So, they were lookin' around for summer camps, which only go for maybe a couple weeks an' cost like an arm and a leg. I told her I had lotsa room, that Gravity Falls had fresh air and nature and squirrels and birds and like that, and you guys would love it here! And—" his face twitched, he clenched his teeth, and between he them said—"I told her it would be free. Man, still hurts to say that! But you were family, and—I guess I was kinda lonely. Anyways, I'm glad it worked out and we all survived."

"Me, too," Mabel said. "It would have been a bummer if you'd lost your memory for good. Or if one of us had died. Or I'd had to marry a thousand Gnomes."

"Yeah, all of that would kinda suck," Stan agreed. "Well-p, I'm gonna run th' gift shop today. That knucklehead Soos is lettin' the suckers in for free, but that don't mean we can't snag some of their dough!"

"Hey," Mabel said, "you remember that first week we were here when we were just twelve years old? How you let us each take a piece of merch?"

"Yeah, Dipper's trucker hat an' that cockamamie grapplin' hook. Oy! How could I forget?"

"Well, Teek's a loyal employee! Shouldn't he get his pick of something, too? Just asking, 'cause you're my favorite Grunkle!"

Stan looked uncomfortable. "Aw, Pumpkin! You should really ask Soos, 'cause he's the manager. No, wait. Soos'd give him somethin' worth hundreds of dollars."

"But you and Grunkle Ford are the owners!" Mabel told him. "C'mon. For me? Pleeease?"

"Aw, OK! Just don't use them cuteness mind powers on me! T.K., look around the shop an' find somethin' you'd like as a souvenir. Anything under ten bucks!"

"Grunkle Sta-an!"

Stan sighed. "Twenty or under, an' that's my final offer! Take it before I change my mind completely!"

"Cool," T.K. said. "Thanks, Mr. Pines!"

"Yeah, yeah. Mabel, you go help him pick somethin' out. I don't even wanna watch. Meanwhile, Soosie, ya wanna go for a pony ride?"

Little Soos clapped his hands and laughed, so Stan sat in his old chair, put the baby on his knee, and began to jounce him up and down.

Mabel and Teek went into the gift shop. "OK," she said, "look around an' pick out something good. You don't get a chance like this every day with Stan!"

"Aw," Teek said, "I don't even know where to start."

Mabel kissed him on the cheek. "I'll be your guide!" she said.

So, they wandered from shelf to shelf, looking at T-shirts with images of pumas, panthers, and multibears on them. Pine-tree caps ("Nope," Mabel said. "They'd remind me too much of pinecest." "What?" T.K. asked. "Later, Teek," Mabel said, "I will explain the term 'shipping' to you."). Mystic pendants guaranteed to turn your neck green. Whistles that no one, not even dogs, could hear. A trick quarter that had not two, but four heads (it involved the fourth dimension, probably). A Gnome figurine that, when you pushed on the red cap, would barf up a rainbow, but then the colors mixed and got messy and you had to scrub it off the table with steel wool and bleach.

Teek had shuffled around a shelf of assorted tchotchkes—paperweights, small coin banks in the shape of the Shack, picture frames that would hold no image larger than 1 ½ by 2 inches, that kind of thing—and way in the back, he found and pulled out a sphere of solid yellow glass about two inches in diameter. "Cool," he said. "A crystal ball!"

"Huh," Mabel murmured. "Never noticed that back there before. You like it?"

"Sure," Teek said. "Watch." He rolled the yellow ball across his palm, over his outstretched fingers, turned his hand over, rolled it down the back of his hand, flipped it into the air, and caught it again in his palm. It lay there like a miniature sun, gleaming in the light.

"Wow!" Mabel said. "Can you juggle?"

"Uh, sort of," Teek said, blushing. "I mean, I couldn't with something like this, I'd need rubber balls or tennis balls. And, uh, I'm not good. I can usually do like three jugs before dropping one. But I'm practicing." He punched his round glasses back into position on his nose—they had a tendency to slip down—and shrugged. "But yeah, this would be fun to fool around with."

"And you can gaze into it and see the future!" Mabel said.

"Yeah. That, uh, that's sort of the kind of thing that Mr. Mystery tells the tourists," Teek said with a smile.

They took the ball back and asked Stan if that would be OK as Teek's souvenir.

He held it and said, "Sure. It ain't glass, by the way, it's genuine crystal." When Mabel put her hands on her hips and shot him a come-now glance, he said, "It's true, on my mother's grave! This was somethin' I found when I first moved into the Shack, after Ford had, you know, had his accident. It was in a box and the box had been labeled in pencil, 'Rare 100% Clear Citrine Crystal.' I put it on th' shelf an' stuck a thousand-dollar price sticker on it, crossed out the figure and replaced it with SALE! $250, figurin' some mark would go for it, but nobody ever did. So sure, take it if you like it."

Teek did, and when Stan went into the gift shop to stock the register and don the fez, black suit, and tie, Mabel and Teek took Little Soos outside, where he rode on Waddles's back—actually Mabel held him in place, but he thought he was riding Waddles—for a few minutes, and then they spread out one of the tablecloths on the grass and let Little Soos tumble around on it for a while, and Teek practiced his hand moves with the yellow crystal, which gleamed brightly in the sun, and got better and better with the moves.

Then Little Soos saw the globe and reached out for it.

"Too big for him to swallow," Mabel said. "Want to let him see it?"

"Sure," Teek said, and he handed the crystal ball to the baby.

Who clutched it, peered into it, cooed, and tried to suck it.

And vanished into thin air.

The ball dropped to the tablecloth.

Mabel said, "Uh-oh."

And that seemed to sum it up.

* * *

**Chapter 2**

"What happened?" Teek yelled, jumping up from his knees to his feet and spinning around like a top as he frantically scanned the whole lawn. "He was right here!"

"Gravity Falls weirdness!" Mabel said, getting up from the tablecloth, where the yellow crystal ball still lay gleaming in the morning light. "Sometimes I get so tired of it. OK, calm down and let's think."

Teek grabbed her upper arms, and behind his round glasses his brown eyes were wide with alarm. "Think? Let's get Soos!" He let go and took a step toward the Shack.

Mabel grabbed Teek's arm, stopping him. "Whoa! No, no, no—bad idea, Teek! You don't want to get Soos involved. I've seen him in action before, so trust me on this one. Heck, I already have one bad mark on my record as a babysitter, and I don't want another one! Listen, Teek, we can't tell anybody yet—not even Dipper, 'cause he'd tell Ford or Stan or both, and then everybody would be upset for no reason."

"Uh—Little Soos just _disappeared!_ That's kind of a reason!" Teek protested.

Mabel patted his shoulder encouragingly. "It's so sweet of you to worry, but really it's probably no big deal. These things usually work themselves out, Teek! Like the time I was held prisoner in a dream bubble, or the time when I got bit by a butterfly and went all cray-cray!"

"But what are we going to do when they miss him?"

"Got that covered." Mabel put two fingers in her mouth and gave a sharp whistle—a skill she had picked up over the past year and one that Dipper envied but had never mastered—and then rummaged in the diaper bag.

Widdles, her newer pig, came trotting. "Here you are, you little angel," Mabel cooed. She quickly did what she needed to do, then asked, "How does she look?"

"Like a pig in a diaper and T-shirt and cap," Teek said.

"Perfect!" She picked Waddles up and hurried into the Shack, while Teek sweated it out, wondering what was going on.

When Mabel emerged, she said, "It's cool. I gave Widdles a bottle and put her in the crib and turned the baby monitor on. Melody says she'll peek in from the door now and then, but until Little Soos wakes up, she'll let him sleep—he likes long naps."

"You—gave Widdles—a bottle—of—"

"Not people milk, silly!" Mabel said. "Regular milk with a little corn syrup in it. It always makes her sleep for four hours, minimum. The room's dim, and Melody won't notice the difference, so that buys us some time!" She knelt again on the tablecloth and picked up the crystal ball. "Let's see. He was playing with this thing when he just popped out of sight."

"You think it's magic?" Teek asked, hunkering down close to her, so close that as they stared at the crystal their heads almost touched. He whispered, "I thought all the stuff in the Shack was, you know, just tourist crap!"

"Not all crap is created equal," Mabel murmured, turning the yellow sphere this way and that, noticing how the sunlight sometimes glinted off it, sometimes simply streamed through it. "You know what I mean? Some crap is crappier than other crap. This may not even be crap. It could be the genuine article. Maybe it's a wishing stone."

Teek turned to stare at her, so close that she could have kissed him. Which she did. But it was just a quick peck, and in the middle of it, Teek started to ask a question: "A what now?"

Mabel licked her lips. "Wishing stone. Like Aladdin's lamp. Let's see." She held the sphere up at eye level, stared commandingly into it, and said loudly, "I wish that Little Soos was back, with a top-of-the-line crossbow. I've always wanted a crossbow of my own!"

Instantly the baby, plus a state-of-the-art Killshot 3000 crossbow, complete with carbon-fiber body, special tension-steel bow, quiver of precision-engineered 18-inch Speed Demon arrows, cocking assist and night scope, all spectacularly failed to materialize out of thin air. "Shoot," Mabel muttered, disappointed. She held the crystal up close to her eye and peered through it, slowly turning it in her hand.

"See anything?" Teek asked anxiously.

She turned toward him. "See you, upside down and sort of stretched out. Not a good look for you." She twirled the sphere, still looking through it. Teek's nose seemed to be as big as the rest of his head in the distorted image she saw. "Must have little irregularities in the crystal, 'cause it kinda deforms everything, sort of ripply, if you know what I mean. Here." She handed the crystal to Teek. "You were rolling it all over your hand just before Little Soos got hold of it. Maybe, I don't know, you charged it up or something? Powered up its batteries? Do some tricks with it."

Teek put it on his right palm and let it roll to his fingertips, where it promptly dropped off. He barely managed to grab it with his left hand before it hit the ground. "Sorry. I'm nervous."

He manipulated the crystal more carefully, succeeding in getting it to roll down his palm, across his fingers, flipped his hand over, and rolled it on the back of his hand before sending it around his wrist and back into his palm.

"Feel anything?" Mabel asked.

"Yeah!"

"What?"

His hand cupped the crystal. "I feel silly! Mabel, we have to tell Soos, or Melody—"

"Hey! It flickered just then!"

Teek looked down in surprise, releasing his grip and holding his hand flat. On his open palm, the yellow crystal lay in the sun, but it looked no different from before. "I didn't see anything."

Mabel took it back in her hand and held it so the sunlight streamed through and focused on the tablecloth. She had to bend over and move the crystal closer and closer until the spot of light from it contracted and sharpened.

"Don't set the tablecloth on fire," Teek warned.

"I'm not gonna do that. Look close. Is something moving in that spot of light?"

Teek adjusted his glasses and peered intently. "Uh—sort of flickers of shadows? I think that's what's happening. I don't see any shapes. Let me try."

He reached for the sphere, Mabel tightened her grip and said, "Not yet—"

 _The instant both their hands touched the globe, the world turned inside-out_.

That's what it felt like to Mabel, anyway—it was as though the crystal expanded suddenly, a transparent yellow shell taking both her and Teek in, and then, well, unfolded somehow—the curved walls around them unbending impossibly in all directions at once, changing everything.

"Oh, no," Teek said. He let go his grip on the crystal and instead reached to hold Mabel's hand.

They were still on the lawn.

But the Shack had vanished, and everything looked wrong. The sky was yellow, for one thing, and the light from the sun was yellow, giving everything a weird shifted spectrum of color. And everything smelled yellow, too. That should have been impossible, but Mabel, whose senses were unusually unusual, immediately could tell the difference.

"Where are we?" Teek asked in a shaky voice. "I don't think this is Gravity Falls anymore!"

"Maybe," Mabel said, thinking hard, "maybe it's Kansas."

* * *

Dipper finished with the tables and asked, "Hey, Soos, want me to spread out the tablecloths on the lawn?"

Soos wiped his forehead. "Naw, dude, 'cause we don't want them to blow all over the place if it gets, like, windy? What you an' me can do, though, is to get the big grill all set up. It probably needs washing and junk, and there'll be ashes to haul away."

"Gotcha," Dipper said, and so at nine he did not go around the Shack and spot the lone tablecloth on the front lawn.

* * *

"How long's she gotta stay in the hospital?" Manly Dan asked a nurse.

"She should be able to go home tomorrow, I hope and pray," the nurse said. She was a thin, jumpy-looking woman, and when the patient in Room 113—Wendy's aunt—simultaneously pushed her call button and bawled, "Nurse! Where the heck are ya? _Now!",_ the poor nurse jumped as though she'd seen a cobra.

"Aunty's got some lungs on her," Wendy observed mildly.

"Hah!" Manly Dan said. "You oughta've heard her in high school when she won the hog-callin' contest. Hogs were still comin' in a week later!"

Wendy nodded, but she was thinking, _Dang, she'll be home tomorrow! I could've stayed in Gravity Falls with Dipper and maybe driven over to see her at home this weekend._

However, she knew better than to say that out loud. Instead, she went to deal with her younger brothers, who were racing rolling gurneys down the hospital corridors, which wasn't all _that_ bad, except for the two terrified, screaming patients on them.

* * *

Stanley had just made the rounds of the gift shop with note cards folded into pup-tent shapes, on which he'd been scrawling with a marker: JULY 4th SALE! HALF OFF REGULAR PRICE.

Of course, earlier he'd gone around with a pricing gun putting stickers on all the merch that had doubled the regular price. He'd also piled select merchandise—stuff that had been in the Shack so long without selling that they had squatter's rights—onto a table with another sign: TWOFER! Buy ONE at regular price, get ANOTHER for regular price! HURRY!

For a moment, he stood back and admired his handiwork. "I oughta be ashamed of myself," he muttered, but he was grinning. "And I would be, too—if this didn't work every single time! Hah! Bring on the suckers!"

* * *

Melody and Abuelita were in the snack-bar kitchen, making hamburger patties and mixing bowls of potato salad, baking big casserole dishes of beans, pouring mustard and ketchup from gallon-sized industrial pump jars into table dispensers—the normal junk for preparing an outdoor feast.

The baby monitor occasionally made soft sounds—contented grunts, little snores. Abuelita beamed. "He sleep like angels," she said.

Another noise, followed by a contented sigh.

"Angels with tummy gas," Abuelita corrected. 

* * *

 

In the yellow-tinged world, Mabel had just said, "Hey, the globe didn't come with us!"

"I think we're _inside_ it," Teek told her.

"Hm. That might make getting back home a little bit harder. I mean, if it's not here, how can we both put our hands on it at the same moment? Oh, well, first things first. Where'd that baby go?"

Though the landscape looked fairly familiar—they stood in a grassy patch with pine woods very much like those surrounding the Shack, and they could glimpse bluffs and mountains beyond—they saw no trace of civilization. No Shack, no parking lot, no driveway.

But Mabel knew where the drive and the road should be. "Come on," she said, leading the way. "We've got four hours!"

It took them five minutes to walk down the driveway—now a sloping, grassy lane—and arrive at the oxcart trail. Or at least that's what it looked like: two muddy wheel-ruts running down the center of a more or less clear and grassy pathway. "Town should be that way," Teek said.

"Let's go. We're bound to find something sooner or later!"

They walked for about a mile—that should have put them on the outskirts of town—but saw no buildings, not even the familiar old water tower. However—

"There's somebody!" Mabel said, pointing ahead. "We'll ask them where we are."

It was, technically speaking, only one person, not two or more, but the gender of the figure was not clear from a distance, and Mabel felt justified in using the plural pronoun. "We'll ask him or her where we are" sounded clunky, and anyway, the figure might even prove to be an _it._

However, it turned out to be a tall, skinny woman dressed in raggedy black, with straggly gray hair and a beak of a nose. "Hi," Mabel said. "Uh, we're kinda lost and we're looking for a baby. Can you help?"

The haggy woman grinned. "Yes, I can aid you in your task if you can answer the riddles I ask."

"Huh?" Teek said.

"You must answer riddles three," the woman said, "before any help you'll get from me!"

"That's a crummy way to get a rhyme," Mabel observed. "Inverting the sentence, I mean, instead of saying 'Before you'll get help from me.' And even that's awkward. What's wrong with 'Before I'll help you?'"

"Look, kid," the woman said with obvious exasperation in her voice, "you think it's easy, making these things up right off the top of my head?"

"No. No, I don't," Mabel told her with a big, friendly smile. "Next riddle, please!"

"Very well, I—what do you mean, ' _Next_ riddle?'"

"I mean the second one," Mabel told her. "Which I just answered correctly, too! Hey, I'm _good_ at this! Last riddle, please!"

"A simple question isn't a riddle!" the woman said. "It has to have an element of puzzlement in it, a misdirection so the ordinary person can't easily guess it! Perhaps a metaphorical reference that the hearer misperceives as literal! Like 'What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs at sunset?'"

"A dog that learns to walk on his hind legs before breakfast but gets hit by the 12:30 bus to Oakland when he accidentally steps into the street because he's so clumsy at walking that way, and then when he gets out of the vet's in the late afternoon, he has a broken leg and has to walk on the other three!" Mabel shot back. "Yes! I'm _rockin'_ this game!"

The woman stared at her. "Please go away."

"Ah-ah!" Mabel said. "We had a deal. Tell me where to find Jesús Ramirez. He's seven months old and the size of a half-grown pig."

"But you never answered a riddle!"

"I answered three!" Mabel insisted. "Look, lady, we both know how this goes, right? I answer the riddles, you grumble but give me directions and hold some vital information back, then we go our way and you get out of this dumb riddle business—no offense, hon, but you're not that good at it—and open a home-décor shop or something."

"I've dreamed of owning a shop," the old woman confessed.

Mabel gave the woman a high five, leaving her staring suspiciously at her own hand as if it had committed an act of treason. "Chase the dream, baby! So where do we look for Little Soos?"

"That way," the woman said, giving up and simply pointing. "You must trace the ways and thread the maze through dangers dire and never tire! The King has tricks, so, uh—I'm kinda stuck here—"

"So hit the bricks!" Mabel said. "Yellow bricks, I'm sure! Thanks, lady! Come on, Teek!"

Teek lingered a moment. "She's nice, really," he said. "Just wound a little tight. She's Mabel, and I'm T.K., by the way."

"I'm the Sand Witch," the woman said. "If you two really do find what you're looking for and discover a way to get out of this land—"

"Yes?"

"Do me a favor and never come back."

"You got it! Hey, Mabel, wait up!"

The Sand Witch watched the two go down the lane, around a curve, and out of sight. "Never in three thousand years has this happened," she muttered. "Ugh, a migraine. I need a nap. What a world, what a world!"

And she turned into a pillar of sand and then fell to the earth with a patter like a million suicidal ants leaping to their doom from a tall tree.

* * *

 

**Chapter 3**

The straggly, overgrown path the Sand Witch had pointed out veered off the oxcart path to the left, toward the spot where in real life the water tower would have stood, approximately. Mabel pushed into it and found the experience like walking into a roofless tunnel.

Young Douglas firs, six and eight feet tall, crowded in on either side, and the path became twisty, which meant they couldn't see ahead. It was a little bit like visiting a Christmas-tree farm run by a mildly deranged farmer. And though they couldn't see anything ahead, they could hear chattering squirrels, the twittering of chickadees, and the incessant drumming of distant woodpeckers. The air smelled piny.

"Smells and sounds like home, anyway," Teek said. "Uh—Mabel? Any idea where we might be?"

"Nope," Mabel replied with serene confidence. "We may be on a different planet. Heck, we may have traveled back in time! Or forward!"

"Or sideways," Teek muttered.

Mabel, in the lead, looked back over her shoulder at him. "Sideways? Come again?"

"Well—I don't think we've gone back in time, or if we have, at least not very far. The landforms are just the same as they've always been. I mean, I saw that there's no railroad bridge at High Bluff any longer, but the shape of the cliffs is the same as at home. So we're in the same geologic era, I think. Uh, I guess we might possibly have gone back to pre-Colombian times, but I don't think so."

"Wait a sec." Mabel's sweater—blue, with a white circle and a red skyrocket on the front—had snagged on a twining briar, and she paused to untangle it. "There. Why don't you think we're in pre-whatever times?"

Teek pointed his thumb over his shoulder. "Because that lady spoke English, and it sounded contemporary."

Mabel stopped and turned to face him, head tilted, eyebrow lifted, a quizzical smile on her face. "Huh. You remind me so much of somebody!"

"The babe?" Teek asked with a crooked return smile.

Mabel frowned in puzzlement. "You remind me of my—wait, what? What do you mean? What babe?"

Teek's grin widened. "The babe with the power!"

Mabel tilted her head the other way, her eyes narrowing. "What power?"

Looking very pleased with himself, Teek shot back, "The power of hoodoo!"

She punched his arm. "You're being silly! I like that! Do it more often. But not now, we've got a baby to save. Let's go." She turned and shoved into the overgrown path again, springy boughs brushing both arms—it had become that narrow.

They continued, through grass that now grew knee-high. In a disappointed sort of voice, Teek told her, "You're supposed to ask 'Hoodoo?' and then I say 'You do!'"

"Yeah," Mabel said, shrugging as she walked. "Bummer, huh? What you gonna do?"

"It's just that I—I . . . was getting at something," Teek said quietly. Now they were hardly on a path anymore, just pushing their way through— _slap!_ —Mabel had let go of a fir branch and it smacked Teek in the face. He spluttered a little, spitting Douglas fir needles.

"Whatever," Mabel said. "You should speak up. Anyway, let's talk about it after we find Little Soos. Whoa!"

They had suddenly emerged from the overgrown trail into a clearing. In the center of the grassy space—and the grass looked neatly mowed and tended here—someone had spread a long, ornate table, big enough to accommodate a dinner party of at least a dozen people—lace-trimmed gold-and-white damask tablecloth, dainty blue-and-white teapots and cups, plates piled high with cakes and snacks.

Six or seven chairs stood around the table at irregular intervals, haphazardly, some of them not even facing the table. Mabel caught tantalizing whiffs of strawberry and vanilla and chocolate. And someone was audibly munching, but they could see nobody.

"Ghosts," Mabel said with a firm nod, crossing her arms and staring around the table. "Probably Category 3!" She sniffed. "Though I don't smell any body odor. Do you?"

Self-consciously, Teek raised his right arm and sniffed. "Um—not much. I, um, sometimes around girls I feel kind of sweaty and awk—"

She elbowed him. "Not you, dum-dum! Category 3 ghosts are almost always invisible, but they reek! I mean, it's all there in the Journal—wait, you haven't read that, sorry. Anyway, they're always hungry. Come on, let's see."

They circled the table at a short distance. The nom-nom-nom sounds continued, but no visible person was eating—and if it was an invisible ghost, it didn't seem to be making any inroads on the food. Everything stayed in place, the only movement the gentle swaying of the tablecloth on one end as a light breeze played with it.

"Anybody here?" Mabel called. Then she giggled. "Excuse me! I meant to ask 'Is anyONE here!"

"Not a soul!" came a high-pitched, sweet voice from thin air.

"So not a ghost," Teek said.

Mabel approached the table. At one place setting, the only one with a chair actually squared up to the table, a luscious-looking chocolate cake waited temptingly, knife and fork on either side. It was not a birthday-cake sized confection, but a small three-layer cake, just about right for one person, round and gleaming in the yellow morning light. The frosting had twisty piping around the edges and a fat brown rose in the center. "This thing," Mabel said to Teek, "is moving!"

They looked hard at it. The top of the cake bulged and sank—in exact rhythm to the "yum-yum" sounds. "I think it may be eating something," Teek said.

Leaning even closer, they kept a sharp watch on the confection.

The cake spun on its plate and opened the space between the two bottom layers. From the crevice came the high voice again: "Would you mind! It's very rude to stare!"

"The cake," Teek said with a sigh, "is talking."

"Excuse me," Mabel said to it, "is this _you_ r tea party?"

This time the voice was less sweet, more frosty: "Certainly! Who do you think laid the table?"

Teek pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes. "You," he said in a dull voice, his eyes squeezed shut. "Because you're a _layer_ cake."

The nom-nom sounds continued, but no answer came. Teek asked, "Am I right?" He opened his eyes. "Hey—where did it go?"

"Mm-oh," Mabel said, licking her fingers. "Come on, we're wasting time."

"You—you didn't!"

"'S been a while since breakfast," Mabel said. "Anyway, I didn't like its tone. Sounded kind of like a half-baked cynic to me. Get it?"

"Please."

"Relax, at least I saved you from some awful puns. Let's see—that's the way we came into the clearing . . . "

"This kind of confirms my guess, though," Teek said, taking a handkerchief from his jeans pocket and polishing his spectacles.

Mabel burped. "What guess is that?"

"Well, think about it. Back there we met a Sand Witch. I don't know what the Sand means, but that sounds like somebody from a fairy tale."

"Ugh!" Mabel said, finally discovering where the path opened up again on the far side of the clearing. "Fairies! Don't get me started on fairies!"

"And this is clearly a mad tea party," Teek continued. "I think we must be in a pocket dimension with physics based on fantasy concepts."

"You know, that's so close to being interesting," Mabel said. "So, what? We're gonna run into a bunch of rip-off characters from kids' books?"

"Mabel, I don't know! But maybe there's a kind of—" Teek floundered a little with the words—"of echo, or resonance, or something. Like maybe we might run into someone a whole lot like Snow White—"

"I'd prefer the Beast from the movie. And not the guy! He was tons hunkier as the Beast!"

"Never mind," Teek said. "I was just telling you what I think."

"And I think we're on a path through the woods! It's widening out again, and now we're going uphill, did you notice? We're bound to come out somewhere!"

“Uh,” Teek said, handing her his handkerchief, “you have a little smudge of chocolate on—here.” He tapped the corner of his own mouth.

Mabel wiped the corresponding corner of hers. “OK?”

“Yeah, you got it.”

Absently, Mabel stuck his handkerchief in her own pocket. “Come on, then.”

Ten minutes of steady climbing, and they emerged on a rounded hilltop. "Whoa!" Teek said.

Mabel gasped. "Check it out!"

They stood on a low summit that, in their world, overlooked Gleeful's Used Car Lot. Beyond it should have stood the town of Gravity Falls, Instead, they saw—

"A castle!" Mabel exclaimed.

So it was, a turreted and crenellated collection of round towers of light-tan sandstone, with the conical roofs making it look almost like a collection of Fourth-of-July rockets pointing due up. It should have looked majestic, but somehow missed that and settled for brooding. And looming. It loomed and brooded with the best of its kind. Maybe Dracula's castle might have rivaled it, but this place was broody and loomy as any non-undead person could reasonably want.

It stood atop the butte where in the actual Gravity Falls, Northwest Manor had been built. And here the whole town had either vanished or had been transformed into a bewildering maze of paths surrounding the castle mount, a baffling warren of stone-walled, bifurcating, intersecting passageways, cut by four concentric, irregular circles of taller walls. For some reason the sky, blue (or actually a kind of pale yellow-green in the yellow light, but Mabel thought of it as blue) and clear before, now lowered down ominously, copper-colored smudgy clouds shot through with dark-gray streaks.

"Oh, yeah," Teek said, standing beside Mabel. "I've seen this movie. Kidnapped baby, population of goblins, David Bowie as the Goblin King!"

"I remember that!" Mabel said. "Such tight pants!"

". . . and he did tricks with crystal balls, too," Teek said.

Mabel nudged him and whispered, "You think there's a connection between his balls and ours?"

"I," said Teek with what dignity he could muster, "am not even going to answer that."

"It doesn't look exactly friendly, does it? So, you suppose Little Soos is in there?"

"I don't have any way of knowing that," Teek muttered. He sighed. "I suppose we have to go check it out, though."

"Sure!" Mabel said, slapping him on the back in encouragement. "What's the worst that could happen?"

He bent over to pick up his glasses. "Um, well, we could both die. And, by the way— _ouch!_ "

* * *

 

Not far from the foot of the hill they found a paved, or at least well-tamped, road that led to the fifteen-foot surrounding wall and the gateway into the maze. As they approached it, Mabel did an air-punch and said, "Hah! Yes! I knew it!" She pointed to a big square stone embedded in the wall close to the gate. It had been deeply engraved with the inscription

**THIS LABYRINTH**

**CONSTRVCTED BY THE FIRM**

**OF LOOM & BROOD, LTD**

**ENJOY YOVR UISIT**

The arched gateway beckoned. Unfortunately, at the same time it also held up its stern other hand as a warning to keep away: the gate, made of some heavy, dark, and immensely solid-looking wood, had been closed, barred, and padlocked in five different places. A piece of yellow paper with untidy hand-printing on it had been tacked to it with a push-pin, the head of the pin a miniature grinning skull.

Mabel and Teek approached, and she plucked the card off the gate, tearing it free of the pin. "Huh," she said.

"What does it say?" Teek asked.

She handed it to him. He read what she had already read:

* * *

 

**The Mangements is NOTT Responsybul 4**

**Lost babbies**

**Evil curseses**

**Magical Screatures**

**Reins of todes**

**Lost babbies**

**Randum fire balls**

**Gobblin attacks**

**Or**

**Wot is a bout 2 happen 2 U!**

**Pleeze go a way if you**

**know wot is good for you**

**r else dropp ded. Thank**

**you for yur copper ation.**

**PS No! Smokeing!**

* * *

 

"Better put this back," Teek said, leaning forward and pulling out the push-pin that had held the note.

He made a surprised yelping sound and dropped straight down into the earth through a cleverly concealed trap door.

Which closed immediately and ceased to exist as a trap door, though it continued its life as a very solid paving stone apparently fully satisfied with its position and career prospects, at least as far as Mabel could judge from its smug expression.

She had seen her share of fantasy movies. She knew here she was supposed to yell Teek's name, fall on the ground, scrabble with her fingers uselessly but frantically at the obdurate, silent stone, perhaps even burst into tears of rage, frustration, and fear.

However—"Gonna flip the script," she muttered, her face set not in fright but in an expression of extreme annoyance. And as Dipper could tell you, that was not something the average fantasy villain (or brother) would care to face.

"OK, Soosie, Teek, hang on. Mabel's coming for you!"

She whipped out that which she was never without, yelled, "Grappling hook!", fired it up to the top of the encircling wall, and then zipped straight up.

Mabel was ready to rumble.

* * *

**Chapter 4**

Mabel didn't know what to expect.

Well, I'm just being dumb here, writing that. Of _course_ she didn't! She was in an alternate reality, for crying out loud! I mean, how _could_ she know what to expect? Some days it's hardly worth getting out of bed and staggering to the computer. Anyway—

Mabel climbed onto the top of the surrounding wall—it was solidly constructed, about two feet wide at that point, and not quite high enough to trigger her acrophobia. "Huh," she said, staring over the impossible, confounding convolutions of the maze. She could see the castle clearly—but once she'd descended into the maze (the internal walls of which were about ten feet tall, as far as she could judge), she'd be cut off completely from the view and would be quickly lost.

To be certain of that, she took out her phone and checked the GPS. No signal, no satellite reception. "Yeah, I thought so. OK, make it hard," she grumbled.

A sprightly British-accented voice, a pre-pubescent boy's voice (though sounding strangely like the voice of a thirty-something actress), said from close beside her, "May I help you, Lady?"

She glanced around. A pointy-eared young man dressed all in green hovered in the air next to her with no visible means of support. "Can you fly me to that castle?" she asked sarcastically.

He doffed his pointed cap and bowed in mid-air. Then he pulled a suspicious-looking small leather bag from his belt. "Of course, Lady! It just takes faith and a pinch of—"

Mabel turned away and gazed back at the castle. "Sorry, I don't do drugs, thanks anyway."

He flitted around until he was directly in front of her. "Um. I could carry you. Will you be my mother?"

Craning to see past him, she flapped her hand as though shooing a pesky fly. "On second thought, just buzz off!"

She stepped to the side so she'd miss him, then leaped down from the wall—and landed five feet below on top of one of the maze divisions, making a good landing on her feet and one outthrust hand. _That must've looked pretty cool!_ she thought. Too bad Teek wasn't around to see it. She stood and started trotting along the top of the intricate maze wall.

The hovering boy cruised along beside her. "You'll never make it on foot."

She snorted. "Watch me, sucka!"

He tapped her on the shoulder. "By the way, have you seen my shadow?"

Mabel stopped in her tracks, turned toward him, reached out, grabbed him by his tunic, and dragged him until they were nose to nose. "Get this, and get it good!" she told him. "I _know_ who you are! You treated Wendy Darling like _crap!_ Dated her for like a couple months, then dumped her back home and once in a while you took her back just so she could clean the house and do the laundry that you and the _guys_ had been neglecting and letting pile up for a whole freakin' year!" She gave him a hard shake, rattling his teeth a little. "And then you _stopped_ visiting and didn't come back until she was thirty or some junk and then you dated her flippin' _daughter_! Listen, Pete, life isn't _The Graduate!_ Leave me alone, go home, and for crying out loud, _grow up!_ " She shoved him away so hard that he turned two complete mid-air somersaults.

When he steadied himself, he shot her one terrified look and zoomed off upward at high speed, gaining altitude so fast that his pointed ears probably popped.

When he had dwindled to a far-off dot in the yellow-gray sky, Mabel nodded, and then surveyed her surroundings and smiled. By traveling atop the dividing walls, she could keep the castle in sight and make a beeline for it, assuming the bee was high on some potent nectar, or maybe Smile Dip. The route just required the occasional five-foot broad jump onto another wall, and a lot of zig-zagging, but she could be at the castle door in minutes.

She backed up a few steps, got a running start, jumped, trotted, jumped again, and with every stride drew closer to her goal.

* * *

"She's not playing fair!" complained the Goblin King, who was spying on her from his spy room in the spy tower through a spyglass.

"Well, y'knows there ain't no rules," his right-hand goblin pointed out reasonably, scratching himself in unmentionable places. "An' you'll pardon me sayin' that's your own fault, y'r honour. Remember? Back at th' beginning, right, you said yourself you weren't gonna have no rules— _gurgk!_ "

With a snap of his fingers, the king had transformed him into a galosh. Not even a pair. Just one sad, lonely rubber boot. "Mr. Snott!" the Goblin King yelled. "Come here, I want you!"

Another goblin bustled into the spy room and tripped over the galosh. He pushed himself up from the carpet and saluted. "Here, sire!"

"You are now my sub-prime minister. That's Puke on the floor."

"Oh, you've been sick, guv'nor? My old aunty used to have a cure for that. Involved beatin' me on the head cruel 'ard wif a cricket bat—"

"Not vomit, Snott, Puke! Remember, you used to play cards with him? Mr. Puke? Round, warty, completely disgusting, smelled like a neglected watercloset in a boys' boarding school? My right-hand goblin he was?"

"Oh, yeh. My old mate, y'means, sire. Dumb son of a bint, easy to cheat."

The Goblin King gestured. "That's him on the floor."

"Wot? You mean the welly? Oh, you, uh, changed 'im, did yer?"

The Goblin King gave an annoyed grunt and turned back to the spyglass. The girl had almost made it to the second circling wall! It normally took them a week to get that far! He growled, "That boot is Puke. Toss him into the garbage chute."

"Good slant rhyme, sire, Em'ly Dickinson would be proud. Yeh, the chute, all right. As you say, sire." Snott grunted as he heroically attempted to lean over and pick up his former friend—for the run-of-the-mill, non-royal orbicular goblin, that was a significant effort, since they do not bend at the waist, having no waist to bend at. By extreme contrast, the Goblin King was tall, thin, cat-slinky, bushy-haired, and good-looking in an androgynous sort of way. This was probably the result of genes, or perhaps it was quantum.

Snott gasped at last: "Nicked 'im, sire. Garbage chute, did yer say, sire?"

Without taking his eye from the spyglass, the king snarled, "Yes! And then return to me immediately, because I have an urgent task for you. We have a girl approaching the cas—"

Sounding hopeful, Snott blurted, "A goblin girl, sire?"

"No, a human—"

Sounding yet more hopeful, Snott asked, "Is she _pretty_ , sire?"

The king peered through the spyglass, adjusting the focus. "Um. I dunno. So-so, I suppose. She has an attractive sweater on, so it's hard to see her figure—"

"Ooh! She's got one of them, 'as she? Wait a bit! Ooh! _Just_ thought of it, sire, sorry, sire, but don'tcha think I'd better set out a feast and get the tableware rehearsed for the dance? The plates an’ cups an’ silverware haven't done their number in so long, I'm sure they're rusty— _gurgk _!"__

In a specially annoyed voice, the Goblin King shouted, "Mr. Phlegm! Come here, I want you. And don't trip over the galoshes!"

* * *

Mabel had come to the end of one of the walls, and the next—one of the taller surrounding walls—was too far away and too high for her to make the jump, so with the help of her grappling hook, she swung down to the shadowy stone pavement at ground level—and discovered that she stood on the edge of a river, or more accurately, a canal. It spread about fifteen feet wide, too far to make the jump, and even looking both ways to where it crooked around the corners, Mabel saw no bridge.

"Well," she said, "there's gotta be one somewhere!" She knew that out of every hundred spunky girl adventurers, ninety would turn right to search, so she turned left. Worst came to worst, she could swim across—it might even be shallow enough to wade—but she preferred not to arrive wet.

"Hello," came a bubbly voice from somewhere around ankle level.

She looked down. "Hi, yourself. What are you?"

"I'm a Water Baby," said the greenish, chubby boy in the canal. "I used to be human—"

"And now you're waterlogged and naked. It's not a pretty sight."

"I have webbed fingers and toes, too!"

"So does the Creature from the Black Lagoon," Mabel said. "But I'm not about to date him, either!"

The boy squirmed, blushing blue from sheer embarrassment. "I'm not hitting on you!"

She reached down and grabbed him by his green, kelp-like hair and dragged him half out of the water. "What's _wrong_ with me that you're not?"

"Gills!" he gasped in a thin, whistling voice. "Gills! Put me back! I'm anti-drowning!"

"I'm not crazy about it myself," she said, dropping him. "OK, WB, you want to help me?"

"I don't know," the boy confessed, rubbing the top of his head. "Will you hurt me if I do?"

"Hurt you if you don't, maybe," she said with an evil smile.

"Um—what do you want me to do?"

"Tell me where there's a bridge."

"Oh. Um. London has some very nice ones, I hear. See, never been there. I was a chimney sweep's lad, up in Yorkshire, right, and—"

"Too much information! Boring!" Mabel put her foot on top of his head and gave him a powerful downward shove. Prudently, he did not re-surface.

Following the canal, she walked on, turning five different corners, all acute, and then she stopped. Right ahead of her a small green rowboat had been tied to a bollard and bobbed gently in the canal's slow current. Two figures stood beside it, apparently deep in discussion. A couple of white Pekin ducks wandered around their feet, hopefully pecking at things that evidently only ducks could see here and there on the stones.

Mabel took a deep breath. She had never in her life seen a three-foot-tall rat or a two and three-quarters-foot-tall mole, and she had never seen a rat or a mole of either size (or even smaller ones) dressed in natty Edwardian-era tweed suits and wearing flat caps, but this wasn't Chinatown, it was, uh, well, wherever it was. "Wish Teek was here," she muttered again.

She approached the two, smiling. She liked animals. Usually. "Hi!" she said. "Nice boat you've got there. I wonder if you could give me a lift to the other side!"

They both started at the sound of her voice, turned toward her, and doffed their hats and bowed. "Hullo!" the rat said in a cultivated voice. British again, naturally. "I'm dashed sorry, Miss, but we're facing a dreadful problem and can't think how to solve it. Oh, I do beg your pardon, allow me! Miss, this is my friend Mole. I am Rat. Mole, this is, Miss, um—"

"Mabel Pines, and believe it or not, you're not the strangest things I've seen today. How about the lift?"

The rat scratched the back of his head. "Well—that is—I mean ordinarily we'd gladly oblige a young lady, Miss Pines, but we're so dreadfully perplexed—"

"You see," the Mole said in a wheezy, high-pitched voice, addressing the bollard (moles don't see too well), "we have these two ducks—and a bag of duck food—and we can only carry ourselves and one thing in the boat, and we need to get them all across—and if we leave a duck with the food, it's all up, isn't it?"

"Yeah, right," Mabel said. "No problemo! OK, uh, you, Rat, you row me across and I'll give you the secret of how to do what you want to do."

"Really? The Rat asked. "We'd be ever so grateful!"

"Quite!" the Mole said to one of the ducks.

"Quack," the duck commented, in a nasty, sarcastic tone, at least for a duck.

"Do climb right in!" the Rat said, holding the boat steady. As she did, he smiled at her warmly and said, "Do you know, I always say there's absolutely nothing in the world better than messing about in boats!"

"That's it, _you_ stay, too," Mabel said, grabbing the oars and pulling away from shore. "Stay where you are, and I'll still help you, but you're not getting in the boat with me! Not with _that_ attitude!"

"I say!" the Rat said, and indeed he did. Say it, I mean. Well, it's there on the page, isn't it? Or the screen. Whatever.

Mabel was not an expert rower, but she clumsied the boat across, climbed out of it, and tied the painter (not an artist, but the rope attached to a ring on the prow of the boat) to a lamp post. She pulled out her grappling hook. "Stand back!"

The claw whizzed across the water and landed clanking on the stones. "OK, let the Mole grab hold of the line and hang onto it tight!" Mabel yelled. The Rat helped his friend find the rope. "Don't let go!" she warned, and then she retracted the line.

The Mole couldn't have let go had he been so inclined—stark terror has that effect on small animals. He landed not so very hard (moleskin is quite soft and protective) and rolled a few feet. Then he got up, circling around and around and patting himself anxiously. "Oh, my! What happened?"

"You flew," Mabel said. "First mole to get off the ground!"

"I—flew?" The Mole sat down on the sidewalk, fanning himself with his flat cap.

"You flew. You're a mole hero. OK, I'll hold the boat, aim it back, and you row over and collect your friend the Rat and the bag of duck food. Here, take this." From inside her sweater she removed her emergency ball of yarn (always on hand for unexpected repair work) and tucked it into the Mole's side pocket. "The Rat will row back over. You will sit in the rear of the boat—"

"Stern," said the Mole.

"Didn't mean to be, I'm just in a hurry. Tie a piece of the yarn to the neck of each duck and hold onto the other ends."

The Mole looked confused. "But won't that pull the ducks into the water?"

"Yes, and they'll swim across behind the boat."

"Because—ducks—can—oh, I say! Ratty! By George!" the Mole called over to his friend, "I think she's got it!"

"Good show!" The Rat applauded, Mabel shoved the boat off, and then she grappling-hooked her way to the top of the second circling wall and smiled grimly. The castle was closer than ever.

Just a matter of time now.

* * *

**Chapter 5**

"Finally!" Mabel made the leap from the last circling wall to a grassy plot that surrounded the castle. Well, it surrounded the _moat,_ and the moat surrounded the castle. Mabel walked down a broad path toward the enormous drawbridge—which was up—and noticed a steady gurgling sound coming from underfoot. And the moat surged with suspicious eddies and whirlpools and the water moved in an obvious current.

"Must be the source of the canal," Mabel murmured. "Dipper would be so proud of me for thinking of that! What time is it, anyhow?" She checked her phone—the clock app was working, anyway—and breathed a sigh of relief. "I have another two and a half hours left, or a little more. OK. Now let me cruise around the castle and see if there's a back way in."

Twenty minutes later she came back to the closed drawbridge. "OK, so there's _not_ a back way in! Let's see what we can do, Mabel! Right you are, Mabel! Mystery Twin!" She gave herself a fist-bump, but it wasn't the same.

She had assumed that the two wooden posts close to the moat on either side of the path served as guides for the lowering drawbridge, but—well, maybe they did, but—even wooden posts can multitask, in their own quiet way. The right-side post also held an accordion-pleated tube that on one end led down into the earth and on the other ended in a sort of funnel.

Mabel picked it up and yelled into it: "Hey! Open up!"

She heard a kind of confused muttering coming through the speaking tube, then a tentative, rather frightened voice: "Who's there?"

"Guess!"

The rusty-sounding voice muttered to itself and then asked, "Um—fairy godmother?"

"One down, two to go! Guess again!"

"Let me see, let me see, I should know this. Um. Is it my old granny?"

"Nope! You're down to one guess, so make this one count. I'll give you a clue: I'm everyone's friend!"

She heard a gasp. "Not—not—my Preciousssss!"

"Boom! You got it. Open the gate, buddy!"

Now, one must understand that drawbridge mechanisms look very simple in the movies, but they're quite complex. Lowering a drawbridge isn't just a quick matter of turning a clanking steel wheel to the accompanying jingle of chains. Oh, no. This particular drawbridge had in fact come with fairly detailed instructions printed in an informative four-color twelve-page pamphlet, some of which read as follows:

* * *

_In order to lower your drawbridge, you must (A) carefully remove the pawl (Part P-12) from the master gear (G-1) as shown in figure 1, being careful not to catch long hair or loose clothing in the teeth of the gear, as this might lead to a malfunction causing the drawbridge not to lower and the loweree not to go on living; (B) move Lever 23-J from position O to position I (O meaning "off," I meaning "In gear"); (C) engage the emergency brake on the winch (foot pedal on the left should be pressed all the way down until you hear a strong "clack" sound; not a "click" and certainly not a "creak"); (D) ready Lever 42-BB by removing the detente pin (this is the drawbridge engagement lever, which gives the top of the drawbridge a prod to encourage it to stop defying gravity and fall); (E) now, whilst grasping the spokes of the winch tightly, simultaneously disengage the emergency brake (stamp hard on the pedal until it clacks and creaks) and then immediately jerk hard on Lever 42-BB. WARNING: once this lever is pulled, the winch will tend to spin madly, like a skunk in a tornado; you MUST carefully control the rate of descent. The manufacturer will NOT honour the warranty on your drawbridge if you carelessly let it fall and shatter into a million pieces, and then, even in the unlikely event your having somehow survived the mad gyrations of the runaway winch wheel and the savagely lashing chains, you will probably starve to death anyway because you can't get out to shop for meals, can you, Mr. Smarty Pants?_

* * *

This information and much more was printed in "GUIDE FOR THE DRAWBRIDGE OWNER," the thorough, detailed, and educational pamphlet that the company (Upson Downs, Ltd) that manufactured the drawbridge had helpfully provided with the kit to offer foolproof instructions to ensure that the proud new owners of an UD-3000 Drawbridge could safely operate their purchase.

Like all such manuals, it lay yellowing, forgotten, and unread by anyone in a sticky drawer in one of the remote pantries of the castle, along with odd rusty screws, some two-inch-long ends of candles with fossilized black wicks, a metal screw-cap that looked as though it should be on some important bottle somewhere, jury-duty summonses (the king never responded to these), letters promising that a Narnian prince was holding a fortune that he could not get out of the country and advising you that he only needed your banking information to make you an absurdly wealthy goblin, some string in such a snarled tangle that it would have made even Alexander the Great despair, and in the rear left corner, an alcoholic mouse who always went there to sleep off a binge.

And _not_ having read this pamphlet is why the creature that had operated the machinery felt briefly astonished as the drawbridge smashed down hard to the far side of the moat with a heck of a crash, though it did not shatter, and why that same creature suddenly and finally wound up as a sort of unpleasant jelly spread out across the interior of the Drawbridge Operations Centre (or DOC, according to the unread manual), a small, windowless stone room.

The moral is _Always read the directions._

Anyway, Mabel crossed over the still-quivering drawbridge and found herself not in the castle proper, but in a sort of anteroom. A tatted orange and brown rug lay underfoot, looking tatty, and on it a small round pedestal table, very intricately carved. Behind that stood a door—an ordinary door, with a round white-enameled knob and a keyhole beneath it. Which was locked, of course.

Mabel knocked, but got no answer. A bored voice said, "The key is on the ceiling."

"Heck of a place for it," Mabel said. The vaulted ceiling rose thirty feet over her head and was so shadowy that she couldn't see anything. "What, is it taped, or stapled—?"

The voice sighed in a sort of Get-this-over-with way and said, "Look at the table."

"Yeah, it's an antique."

The voice became reproachful: "It's Baroque."

" _I_ didn't touch it!"

Turning peevish, the voice snapped, "No, look _on_ the table!"

Mabel did. "OK, I see a little brownie sort of a cake that has a tag saying 'Eat Me.' That's just rude. And here's a bottle of something that has a tag, 'Drink Me.' What are these, free samples?"

Now out of patience, the voice replied, "The cake makes you grow immensely tall! The wine makes you shrink!"

"Huh, likely story. Who'm I talking to, anyway?"

And now it was huffy: "To me, of course!"

"You sound all snooty and English."

"Well, rather. I am a bit of a nob, you know."

Mabel zeroed in. The voice issued from the keyhole—the old-fashioned kind that looked like the symbol you sometimes see on the doors of ladies' rooms, circular top for the head and long narrow triangle leading down from it like an unfashionable dress. Mabel leaned over and said, "You're a talking door."

The keyhole moved as it articulated words: "No, just the hardware."

"So . . . what are you suggesting?"

In a waspish, poisonously polite way, the keyhole said, "My dear, don't you understand? You're an American, aren't you? Hopeless. If you eat the cake, you will grow so large that you can pluck the key off the ceiling. Then you drink the wine, and you will become so tiny you cannot reach the keyhole. The food and drink are deceptively unhelpful. Diabolical!"

"So—how do I get in, then?"

Now the voice had a hateful tone of superiority: "You don't!"

Mabel picked up the little cake. "We'll see about that. Have some!" She squooshed the cake against the keyhole, muffling the alarmed voice. She kept pushing—something was happening—the whole door groaned as the hardware enlarged wildly, splintering the wood. "There you go!" Mabel said, stepping through the enormous keyhole.

"I HATE YOU!"

"Live with it," Mabel said. "Now which way to that baby?"

"I WILL NOT HELP YOU!"

"OK. Bye!"

Beyond the door lay long branching corridors. Kind of an interior maze. No other doors, until she came to the very end of a hallway. There two identical doors stood side by side, with bas-relief carvings of gobliny faces.

"Halt!" one wooden face said. "You must choose a doorway!"

The other said, "One path leads to certain doom!"

And the first then added, "But the other will allow you to find the young man who fell through the trap door!"

"Teek?" Mabel asked.

The wooden figures looked confused. The right one said, "Um—we're mahogany, actually."

"It's a dense wood," the other added helpfully.

"I could've guessed that. Where is Teek?"

The right door said, "Uh—you haven't let us finish—"

"I," said Mabel in an ominously sweet and calm voice, "am in a hurry. I have a very good friend who carries an axe around with her constantly. If you don't want to help, I'll get her to come and _persuad_ e you. Are we clear?"

"He's in an oubliette!" the left-hand door blurted. "Oops, I shouldn't have said that! No, I _should_ have! Wait, I'm all confused!"

Mabel's face turned purple. "You _cooked_ him with _eggs_?"

"No, not an omelette!" the right door squeaked. "An oubliette!"

"It's a kind of dungeon," the left one added helpfully. "But not really! It's a nice place, not a dungeon at all! Um."

"No doors, no windows," the first door explained. "Just a hatch in the ceiling. Cozy, really."

"Yeh, this castle's oubliettes ain't bad as oubliettes go," the left one said. "Or they are! Places of torture and terror, is what I meant to say!"

"OK, so which door—"

"Let us finish!" the right door said. "Where were we? Right, one of us always lies and the other one always tells the truth, and you can ask only one question of one of us to find out which door leads to—"

"Whatever!" Mabel said. She pointed to the right guard. "OK, I'm asking you! If I asked the other door which door leads to doom, which door would he tell me?"

"The left one," the door said. "Um."

"Open up, righty!"

"Wait, wait," the left door protested. "How can you be sure?"

"If he's the liar, he'd lie about which door the truth-teller would tell me, and the truth-teller would say 'left,' so he would've said 'right.' But if he's the truth-teller, he would have told the truth and so the left door's the wrong door, and the right door is still the right door, right?"

"How do we know?" the right door asked piteously. "We've never seen what's on the other side!"

"Then how do you know how to tell the truth or to lie?" Mabel asked.

The left door sounded embarrassed: "Uh, well—actually, we've never had to before. I mean we do all the time! I'm not doing well, am I?"

As though coming to the rescue, the right door said hastily, "Yeh, my mate's right about us not having to, 'cause most people give up and take the other way."

"Which other way?"

The right door said, "The stairs leading from the hidden door in the vestibule. You can't miss them."

"Really?"

"Yeh."

The left door said, "No."

"Are you lying?"

The door that had said "No" said, "Uh—yeh. Wait, no! No, yeh!"

"Open up the right door," Mabel said. "I was right the first time."

The door swung open, and ahead Mabel saw another corridor, this one ending in a grand staircase. As she ran down it, the voices of the doors came from behind her. "If she asks me if I lie, and I do lie, and I say I don't lie—"

"Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

At the top of the stairs Mabel opened a random door and found a whole herd of mice—pack of mice? Just a second. Huh. Googled it: the venereal term for mice (relax, that just means the term for a whole bunch of them) is "trip." A big trip of mice was industriously sewing a dress.

 _Trip_ of mice. Who would've guessed?

"Hi," Mabel said. "Mabel Pines here, don't want to interrupt you, but could you tell me where the omelette with the young man is?"

The mice conferred, sounding like a peace conference of wrens wrangling on weapons-treaty clauses, and then one squeaked, "There's one in an _oubliette_ , if that's what you mean. Up two floors, front of the castle just over the drawbridge between the two arched windows, and look for the hole in the floor. He's in there."

"Thanks!"

Another one squeaked, "He's not alone!"

"That's OK! I'm packing!"

When she had left, one of the mice scratched his head. "Who was that?"

"Dunno. Seemed like a nice girl, though. Must be going on vacation. She's packing."

"Must be nice to have a vacation."

"Yeh. If I had one I’d go to the beach."

“Not me. All that sand.”

“What’s wrong with sand?”

“You have sand, you get cats.”

“Oh, yeh. Mountains, then.”

“That’d be nice.”

“Yeh.”

“Yeh.”

And the trip of mice resumed its needlework.

The castle had not been designed for the convenience of visitors. Mabel had to ask twice again to find the oubliette—once she got a pointer form a grandmotherly type who was lying on a mechanic's creeper beneath an enormous pumpkin on four jacks, and who muttered, "Just a second, I can't get this damn muffler loose" before rolling out from under it and pointing with her wand the way to another stairway, this a spiral one.

The second time, in a big square room at the top of the spiral steps, she met a dark-haired boy with chocolate-smeared cheeks, clutching a glittering golden card, who said, "Ach, ja, I saw something like that back that way. Uh—haff you seen a tour group? In the chocolate room, separated from them I became."

"Sorry, no!" Mabel yelled back.

She saw light ahead and then sped through a doorway. Two immensely tall Gothic-arched windows with complicated panes pierced the wall ahead, letting yellow daylight flood in. And a circular hole in the floor, a bit like a manhole without a lid, invited her attention. Mabel ran to the edge, dropped to her knees, and called, "Teek? You in there?"

"Yes!"

"I'm on my way!"

With the help of the grappling hook, she let herself down.

The oubliette did look cozy—it was a small, neat, circular room, a pristine white shag carpet on the floor, the walls hung with scarlet and yellow satin, a round table gleaming with plates of food, and glasses, and bottles, and a candelabra with a dozen candles giving a good light, a comfortable-looking canopied bed, Teek in it lying beneath a patchwork coverlet and propped up with three pillows, and sitting cross-legged on the bed beside him a girl, a gorgeous dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty who in the flickering illumination looked half-naked.

"Teek," Mabel said in a deadly-serious voice, "you've got some explaining to do!"

* * *

**Chapter 6**

By way of explanation, Teek said, "Uh," and scrooched down lower beneath the down-filled quilted comforter. The girl—a dark-skinned young woman, really, probably nineteen or twenty—rose with the lithe grace of a gazelle, put her hands together palm to palm, and bowed toward Mabel. With a serene expression and huge brown doe eyes that Mabel simultaneously envied and yearned to stick her thumbs in, she said, "Greetings, O stranger! I have humbly tried to make this one feel more at ease—"

"Fashion tip," Mabel said. "If your basic outfit is a thong and two pasties, you might as well leave off the see-through jacket and harem pants. What is that material anyway, voile?"

"Erm, yes," the woman said, spreading the outsides of the balloon-like harem pants. A thin gold chain ran round her bare midriff. She was barefoot, though she wore gold anklets that were attached by more thin gold chains to gold rings around her big toes, which were not really big but impossibly cute. They were a delicate shade of blue (the voile jacket and harem pants, not her toes), but her indelicate shade of tan glowed right through the thin material. "Woven by magic in a lost oasis on a night of no moon by—"

"I'm Mabel," Mabel said, cutting off the runway description. "And _that_ is my boyfriend, T.K. And _what_ are you doing in bed with him?"

"Oh. Um. My name, O stranger Mabel, is Scheherazade—"

"Doesn't sound American to me," Mabel said, frowning. "Homeland Security got you on any kind of list?"

She looked puzzled, in an intolerably cute way. "Ah—these words sound foreign to my humble ears, O Mabel. I comforted the one you call Teek—"

"We didn't do anything!" Teek said from beneath the covers. "She just told me stories!"

"My stories!" Scheherazade said with a winning smile. A _cute_ winning smile. Mabel thought, _My God, she's even less tolerable than Pacifica at her worst!_ Almost singing instead of speaking, Scheherazade did a few dance moves as she said, "O friends, doth not the dreary hour fly more fleetly when someone speaks the words of a story? Though they be but humble, I have in my heart a stately stock of stories! Telling them is my specialty!"

Mabel looked dubiously at her breasts, revealed by the transparent voile as round and firm and rosy as pomegranates, and her slender, smooth, tanned thighs. "Yeah, among other things, I bet," she said. "OK, she-hulk or whatever you said, I'm here, so you're relieved of duty. Scat!"

"Oh, but I could tell you a story," Scheherazade said, settling down on the rug in a lotus pose. "Once on a time, a great sultan was mightily puzzled over how much he should levy in taxes so that each would pay a fair share—"

"Don't tell the one about the camels again!" Teek wailed. "It makes no sense and it goes on, like, forever!"

Mabel tested the grappling hook line. "Here you go. Get up. Stand up! Now climb up. Go. While you still have all your teeth and hair."

Reluctantly, Scheherazade rose, bowed, and with surprising agility climbed up the rope, pulled herself over the edge of the round hatch—giving them a rather spectacular rear view in doing so—and then stood and waved goodbye. "Farewell, my friends, until the night brings a new moon—"

"The old one was plenty fat enough!" Mabel yelled back, and the girl made a huffing sound and then left them. Mabel turned to Teek. "Get out of that bed, Mister!"

Teek pulled the cover up over his face. "Can't!"

Mabel strode to the bed and grabbed the edge of the coverlet. "Why not?"

Teek clutched it harder. "They took my clothes!"

Mabel let go of the coverlet. "Who took your clothes?"

"The guards who threw me in here! They were weird little guys. Goblins, I think. They were all short and fat and smelled funny!"

“Sure they weren’t just gamers? I ran into gamers at Comic-Con, and they—never mind! These guys dumped you in the hole and that tramp was down here just waiting for you, huh? Like a trap-door spider!"

Teek's head popped out again. His glasses sat askew on his nose. "No, she came in later. A genie dropped her off because she said she felt sorry for the Goblin King's prisoners and wanted to cheer me up. So she sat on the bed and told stories. That's all she did, I swear! And the stories—they were awful!"

Mabel herself sat on the edge of the bed and reached out to straighten his glasses. "Horror stories, huh?"

"Uh—no. Thanks. Politics, sociology, and economics. She spent thirty minutes lecturing me about what a vizier is, how vital a vizier is to a sultan, what deep knowledge they have, how intelligent and cunning they can be, and why they're all villains and not to be trusted."

"Yeah," Mabel said skeptically. "I'll bet it was just a matter of time before she started to say, 'Oh, my, it's so cold in here! Would you mind if I slipped under the cover just to . . . warm up?'"

"Don't use that sexy voice!" Teek pleaded.

She turned on the bed to face him. "Why, don't you—oh! Oh, I see."

"How?" Teek asked, frantically fluffing the coverlet.

"No, I mean I _understand_. Sweaty and awkward, right? Where did the guards take your clothes?"

"I don't _know_! They just stripped me and shoved me through the hole and I landed on the bed! I'm lucky they left me my glasses! When Scheherazade showed up, I barely had time to jump under the covers!"

"Heh. 'Barely.'"

"Mabel! Don't joke! I need help!"

"All right, all right, don't have a cow."

"I was—what was that?" He stared at her in a baffled way.

Mabel had hopped off the bed and started to tug down the sheets of red and yellow satin that hung on the walls. "Hm? Oh, a boy I met a couple of years ago used to say that. Bart, I think his name was. We went for a walk on the Mystery Trail. Weird kid, I think he had jaundice. Just a minute."

She perched on the foot of the bed and reached inside her sweater. From somewhere—hammerspace, she supposed—she produced the little sewing kit she always carried. The scissors were little better than toy-sized, but she kept them wickedly sharp, and in a couple of minutes she had cut out a simple pair of breeches—red front, yellow back—that were sort of like pajamas, as well as a tunic (yellow front, red back). She threaded a needle and started to stitch furiously.

"What are you doing?"

"Making you some clothes!"

"Out of that? I'll look ridiculous!"

"Yeah, as opposed to wandering around the castle bare-assed."

"Mabel!"

"Don't worry about it!" Mabel snapped. "We're in this pocket fantasy thingy, anyhow. And from the way the people here dress, I think you'll probably fit in better than you would in T-shirt and jeans. Here, try these on while I finish the shirt. Sleeves have to be cuffed. No buttons, though, so that speeds things up. It's a pullover."

Teek floundered around under the covers and then said, "They're on. Sort of."

"Stand up and let me see."

He did. The pants were baggy and too big in the waist.

"I'll have to take two darts," Mabel said. "Also, I'll sew on some loops. I'll cut the braid off the coverlet and you can use that like a belt." She snipped off the thread, re-threaded the needle, and said, "Stand here with your back to me."

Teek did, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

"Stand still!" She pulled the material taut. "Teek, you got a nice butt."

"Mabel!"

"I just took a little peek down the back. OK, now, real still." Her needle flew. "That's one . . . now over here . . . OK, how's that?"

Teek still held onto the waistband. "I don't think they'll stay up, but the waist is snugger."

"Take 'em off and I'll cut and sew on the belt loops."

"Mabel!"

"For crying out loud! Do you think I'm gonna assault you at a time like this? We have to find Little Soos!"

Reluctantly, Teek shucked the pants down and stood with his back to Mabel, crouched over. "Boys can be so ridiculous," she muttered as she rapidly sewed. "That's six, that'll do. Here you go, put them back on and I'll make the belt. Well, turn around!"

He did, still hunkered over, both hands hiding his—what did the drawbridge guy call it? His precioussss.

"I'll look away!" Mabel said. She had pulled the coverlet off the bed, and she bent over it, snipping with the scissors. The braid, sort of a golden chenille rope, came off in one piece. "Here. Run this through the loops and tie it."

Teek wound up clad in what did look like gaudy pajamas. And he was barefoot. "OK," Mabel said. "That'll do for now. First chance we get, we'll knock out a guard and steal his boots."

"They wouldn't fit!"

"You've read as much fantasy as I have," she snapped. "They always fit!"

* * *

A few minutes later and a couple of floors higher, she asked, "Do they fit?"

"Uh—yeah, they do," Teek said, tying the left boot. "Is he—you hit him pretty hard—is the guard—"

"He's _resting,_ " she said firmly. "Let's go."

They climbed spiral stairs and straight stairs and ladders and finally emerged on a round balcony high on the tallest of the towers. "Spectacular view," Mabel said, trembling in every joint but leaning on the round railing. The mountains, forests, and bluffs stretched as far as they could see. Had the sky been clear and blue instead of black-smudged yellow, it would have made a good postcard photo.

"Yeah," Teek murmured, shyly touching her shoulder. "Uh, Mabel? I—I want to—oh, heck!"

To her surprise, he grabbed her, turned her around, and kissed her hard—

 _Better than Mermando! Lots better than Trey! Mmm! Darn it, I did a foot pop! Oh, well._ . . .

When they broke apart, she said, "Wow! That was great, but—down, boy! We don't have time right now."

He was smiling but also looked on the verge of tears. "Oh, Mabel! I just feel so—I've always been kind of a loner—but from the first time I saw you, well. you know. Mabel, I lo—like you! A lot. I mean. . . .uh, you're the coolest girl I know!"

"Yeah," Mabel said, ruffling his hair and smiling into his eyes. "But right now we have to find somebody who can tell us where the baby is. There'll be time enough for you to tell me all about it after we get home. And I _do_ expect you to tell me all about it!"

The two of them returned to the interior and searched for another way up—because, Teek said, the baby was always hidden in the tallest tower. "See, I think I've figured it out," he told her. "At least partly. Instead of being controlled by physics, the reality here is controlled by narrative conventions."

"I went to a convention once," Mabel said in a distracted tone. "I mentioned it a while ago. Comic-Con."

"No, I meant—whoa, what? Really, you weren’t just joking? San Diego, you mean? Cool!"

"Yeah, it was pretty cool. We won a prize for dressing like ourselves. Haven't we been in this room before?"

They stopped and looked around. They stood in a vaulted, roundish room—not circular, but its walls had many angles. The floor could not be called an octagon, nor even an icosagon (well, it could be, but that would be incorrect terminology), but whatever else it might be, it certainly was a many, many angled polygon. A fireplace—no fire in it, but so wide and tall that they could both have stood upright inside it—was a major feature. Love seats and chairs stood around the walls, and a chandelier high overhead gave light. On one wall a mirror—oddly shaped, a truncated oval with a flat bottom—as tall as Mabel hung about waist-high.

"Got it," Teek said. "Let's try this."

He walked to the mirror and said, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, uh, answer when you hear my call!"

Bright varicolored lights flickered in the dim mirror, like the wonderful and hugely expensive under-the-sea effects in computer-generated films involving fish searching for other fish. Then a voice said, "Em fo hsiw uoy od tahw?"

"Huh?" Teek asked.

"Mirror talk," Mabel said. "It comes out reversed. Let me." She walked up to the mirror and said loudly, "Um . . . ta ybab taht erehw?"

The mirror flickered. "I didn't quite get that."

"I asked you where the baby is!" Mabel snapped.

"Well, you don't have to be snippy! That's no reflection on you, sorry, I've had a bad millennium. What babe?"

"The babe with the power!" Teek said reflexively.

"Shut up!" Mabel snapped. "I mean Soos Ramirez, the baby that got pulled into this crazy dimension through a whackadoodle yellow crystal ball and who's probably being held by the Goblin King somewhere in this castle!" She strode to the fireplace and grabbed a solid steel poker. Then she walked purposefully back to the mirror, tapping the end of it in her hand with deliberate menace. "Spill it, pal. You know I can make you crack!"

"All right, all right," the mirror said. "You're on the right track. This is the central tower, and there is a baby-sized prison chamber in the tip top of the tower, but it is inaccessible. I mean, you can take the elevator to the hundred and third floor, but the place you want is on the hundred and fourth, and there's no stairway, ladder, elevator, or any other mundane means of getting up to it—access is only through magic."

"Where's the elevator, and what floor are we on now?"

"Out the door past the fireplace, second door on the right, and you're on 97."

"Thanks! We're close! Come on, Teek!"

The teens hurried out.

The mirror murmured to itself, "What horrible people. Boy dressed nicely, though." And it fell back to its reflections on life, the universe, and everything.

* * *

**Chapter 7**

**From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _It's about ten-thirty. Ten thirty-two, I see from my phone. Well, I'm finished for a while! We've got the tables and all the chairs set up, I carried out boxes of paper plates and cups, the Willets just arrived to supervise the cooking (they're going to grill chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers, and some veggie patties in case any vegetarians show up—they're rare in Gravity Falls. I mean, Wendy's an occasional vegetarian, but she says that's just when she starts to feel heavy and wants to drop a pound. I wish she was here)._

_Got sidetracked there for a minute. But anyhow, I've got some time to myself. I'm up in my room, Journal on my knees, no problem to solve, no mystery to unravel, no freak of nature to pursue._

_And. . . .I'm bored. Which is not often possible in Gravity Falls._

_What I ought to do is go find Mabel. There's always something going on with Mabel!_

_Huh. It's about fifteen minutes later, and I can't find Mabel and/or Teek anywhere. I like Teek and all, but I'd be pretty upset if I didn't know they were babysitting Little Soos. They wouldn't get up to any funny business with him around._

_Weird thing—out in the front yard there was one tablecloth already spread out on the lawn (the others are stacked up on the porch with a rock to hold them down in case of wind, which so far we haven't had). There was a crystal ball, I guess, on the tablecloth. It's not a fancy one. It's probably some kind of Lucite or other polycarbonate, and it looks like it's contaminated, because it's all yellow. Or maybe it's some variety of natural crystal that happens to be yellow._

_Anyway, I picked it up and brought it inside, so nobody would steal it. It's over on my desk right now. I have no idea where it came from, but it's probably Mabel's or Teek's. I'm going to check Mabel's room. I knocked on the door earlier and nobody answered, and I didn't look in, but Mabel would come busting right in on me, so I'm going to look just to make sure she (and Teek, I guess) aren't in there being real quiet._

_Back again. They weren't. I went into the room and even opened both closets. That was a mistake. In her craft closet, Mabel has both of her sewing machines, both in their cases, stacked up one on the other, and on top of them stood a big conical spool of heavy twine—she uses it in crafts, I guess—but stuck over that was a Dipper sock puppet. It was staring up at me with its weird googly eyes, and it scared the dickens out of me!_

_I mean, for just a weird second, I was sure that somehow Bill had come back to possess the puppet and was about to tell me he wasn't going to honor his promise to get out of this dimension for good. It also made me flash back to that horrible time when Bill possessed my body and I briefly possessed Mabel's first Dipper puppet, which got destroyed in a fireworks explosion. See my section of Grunkle Ford's Journal 3 for details._

_Uggh! I haven't confessed this to Mabel, and I've tried to hide it, but now puppets freak me out! I even felt creepy-crawly last year when we had a funeral for Mr. Stringfellow, one of her marionettes. Anyway, I got up my nerve and yanked the puppet up and saw it was just stuck on the spool of twine, no Bill in it at all and it was totally inert, so I put it back and left it and hurried back up here to the attic._

_Oh, man, I sure wish Wendy was back!_

_I'd get out my box of pictures and just lie on my bed and look at them and dream about her, but that's probably not a great idea. Maybe I'll examine that crystal globe and see what I can find out about it._

_I'm missing Wendy so much! Now I almost wish we had that telepathy thing going full blast again. I'd call her, but Manly Dan . . . well, better not to phone her when it might bother him._

_And that reminds me! Last month, Wendy and I had breakfast one morning together at Greasy's Diner, and she noticed the manliness tester had been fixed. She dared me to try it again, and I asked, "Why should I humiliate myself all over?"_

_And she said, "Dipper! C'mon, man! You're not the same guy you were two years ago. Do it for me."_

_So . . . I did._

_And I did not win us free pancakes._

_On the other hand, I didn't wind up as a wimp! I got a solid score of "MAN," just one notch below "MANLY MAN," the top score possible._

_"Proud of you, dude!" Wendy said. And then she tried it and got the same score I did. We laughed about that._

_Tambry and Robbie came in as she was trying and saw her, and Tambry tried and got "BARELY PASSABLE," and Robbie wouldn't try at all because he said he had to take care of his guitar-playing hand. But Tambry posted about it on her blog. She had me pose with the machine for a photo, but my hand was aching and I didn't really try the tester a second time._

_Anyway . . . as we strolled back to the Shack that morning, Wendy put her arm around me and said, "Dipper! My main man! Certified now!"_

_I am missing her so bad right now!_

_Especially . . . well, this is hard to write, but I'm going to. Especially since Mabel and I haven't been as close this summer as normal. I mean, I have Wendy, but she has Teek, and somehow we're just not the old Mystery Twins lately._

_I know what I ought to do. I ought to snoop around and find some anomaly that needs investigating and talk Mabel into helping. She and I need to have a good adventure together. And not involve Teek._

_Or . . . Wendy, either, I guess._

_What I'm saying is, I don't want Mabel and me to drift apart. I don't think we'd ever hate each other, or get mad at each other, the way Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford did. But I miss her teasing me._

_That stupid puppet! I don't know what she's going to do with it, but I'll bet it's some surprise she's planning just for me, and that makes me feel guilty for not always being there for her. I wonder where she is. I hope she's not off getting herself into trouble._

_Nah, not possible, not when Teek's with her. He's dull and predictable, but he's real reliable. He'll keep her from anything too silly or dangerous._

_I hope._

_Oh, well. Guess I'll put the_ Journal _away and see if there's anything to be deduced from the crystal ball._

* * *

At that same moment, Teek and Mabel were preoccupied fighting a half-dozen goblins.

It was not as though they had a choice. He and Mabel should have realized that the mirror would somehow send the alarm up. When the elevator door opened, six grinning goblins sprang forward. One of them, lingering behind the others, drew a short bronze-bladed sword from its scabbard and yelled, "Give up, puny humans! You have no chance!"

But Mabel grabbed a spear right out from one astonished goblin's grasp, smacked a second goblin over the head with it, then did the same to the first, and when the three others in the front line turned to try to help him, Teek waded in, punching them one-two-three right between the eyes.

They dropped their weapons and struck back, but despite their goblin strength, their blows made little impression on Teek, who'd stored up a considerable amount of resentment against these creatures who had depantsed him and then indirectly subjected him to a long series of boring lectures from a barely-dressed seductive-looking woman whose very figure intimidated him.

Also, the goblin guards had trained only with spears and crossbows and on the final exams they’d all copied from Pus’s paper anyway, and their short arms didn't reach very far, and they didn't fight with much forethought—instead of concentrating on Teek's torso (or lower), where they might have hurt or slowed him, they all aimed upward at his head, so their fists lost most of their momentum before connecting.

On the other hand, goblin skulls are thick, and normally it takes more than Teek had to knock one out. However, this skinny human boy dressed in strangely colorful clothing who boxed inexpertly but with the strength of a maniac frankly dismayed them.

Anyway, the creatures were not very good at hand-to-hand fighting in the first place—as just hinted, goblins don't train in that at all, and they rely on their ugliness as the first-line weapon, because that usually intimidates anything with more brains than a three-toed sloth—and in their surprise and panic at this fearless hero, dressed in scarlet and saffron like a warrior prince out of legend, except for their leader, every one of the goblin guards had abandoned his weapon and flailed at Teek with knobby fists but without significant effect, though at least one of their blows landed on his nose, not breaking it but making it bleed.

Fortunately, goblins are also notoriously squeamish about the sight of blood. And as is well known, the penalty for drawing blood in any fight with a heroic prince out of legend is hanging, disemboweling, quartering, burning alive, and then—well, then it begins to become unpleasant.

The goblin leader, standing behind the others, becoming aware that his troops were losing to a teen-ager and a mere boy, backed up by a helpless girl, stared at the berserk teen with wide eyes and mouth and gripped the short sword but didn’t dare try to use it. Trying to make his voice deep, but succeeding only in sounding like a chipmunk on helium, he shouted, "Stop that! You're not supposed to do that!"

The others having backed or crawled away, Teek stooped and came up with a dropped crossbow, cocked and ready. "What's your name!" he snapped, striding forward.

With his back against a stone wall, standing as straight as a globe possibly could and staring cross-eyed at the arrowhead with undisguised horror, the leader squeaked, "Funk! I'm Funk Grubgrabber! Please don't hurt me!"

Teek took two more steps forward and leveled the crossbow at a little less than point-blank range and grinned, his dark hair falling over his forehead. A little blood from his nose leaked over his lip and stained his teeth. At the sight of blood, the leader couldn't even make a sound, but he mouthed the words, "Don't eat me!"

Teek ignored that. " _You've_ got a sword, but _I've_ got you dead in my sights. You make one move, I send an arrow right through your head before you can make a second one. Now, I know what you're thinking: You're thinking that I'm a human, I've never held a goblin crossbow, I might not know how to use one. But it's a simple pull of the trigger, isn't it? And I'm within _inches_ of you. So, considering this is a top-of-the-line goblin weapon and the pull is strong enough not only to shoot an arrow that will both penetrate your head but also sink six inches into the stone behind you and pin you there like a dead bug, there's one question you gotta ask yourself. Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya—Funk?"

The goblin's eyes watered, so focused was he on the deadly black arrowhead aimed at his nose from a bare hand-span away. He shook his head. “Uh-uh!”

In a purr that somehow sounded more dangerous than a shout, Teek said, "Then drop that freakin' sword and _get out_!"

The sword clanged to the stone floor. And for good measure, just as the goblin stepped sideways toward her, Mabel, who had discovered that a heavy ash-wood spear haft, when smacked sharply on the head of a goblin, creates a satisfying, deep, rather pleasant, resonant sustained note, like a low G played on a kalimba, struck him very hard, so he staggered in a little circle.

At the exact same moment, mistakenly thinking that the goblin leader was going to grab Mabel and snarl, "Put down the bow or the girl gets it," Teek swung his right leg forward and his foot, shod in a heavy goblin boot, made firm contact with the creature's groinal area, thus making him produce a groan very much like a digeridoo hitting a harmonious note with the kalimba—a virtual international music festival—and he gained the distinction of being the last goblin to fall.

(This is just by the way, but in later years Funk Grubgrabber became famous among the goblins for his bravery in the conflict, and they made several folk songs—or goblin songs, I suppose—about the battle. One wound up,

* * *

_"Funk should've been dead,_

_Struck on the head_

_And kicked in the family gems,_

_But Funk, he stood fast,_

_And got a boot in the ass_

_And the fight all went out of him,_

_But he was the last goblin to fall!_

_The very last goblin to fall! Hurrah!”_

* * *

Funk would sit there listening and pretending modesty. The others would always quaff a toast to him and usually shed a tear. [The tear might not be from sentiment, though. Goblin ale is a little stronger than jet fuel.]

Anyhow, it was a lovely song, as goblin songs go. Don't tell _me_ goblins have no soul!)

Teek, holding the crossbow in his left hand and making a fist of his right, his chest heaving, his nose bloody and his right eye turning purple, glared around at the others and panted, "Anybody else want some of this?"

The two goblins who were still able to walk fled, crowding through a narrow door leading into the stairwell and tumbling downstairs. The others crawled after them, croaking, "Don't leave me!" Mabel graciously held the door and when the last one, the leader, had dragged himself through, helpfully directed him to the steep stairway by kicking him in the rear. He rolled onto the stair and bounced downward, and from some floors below came a sound remarkably like a bowling ball making a strike.

"Yes!" she said, pumping her fist in the air. "So much for the palace guard!" She ran to Teek, threw her arms around him, and kissed him, bloody nose and all, and then she pulled the handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed at the trickle. "My hero!"

"Really?" Teek asked, dropping the crossbow, which went off—in actual practice, pistols, crossbows, and the like almost never go off when dropped, having been engineered to prevent such an inconvenience, but in stories and movies, it always happens. It's like a car shooting over a cliff. Upon impact, it _will_ explode, every single time. And the same is true of a horse-drawn wagon. Or possibly even of a horse—a startled neigh, a drop over a steep cliff, a boom, and a rising cloud of red flame and black smoke. Narrative convention.

"Come on," Teek said, holding Mabel tight. "We've got a baby to rescue."

"Oh, _really?_ " came a sarcastic voice from someone who had just materialized in the room.

Mabel instantly realized they were in trouble.

Because the voice had a British accent.

* * *

**Chapter 8**

"I," rumbled the Goblin King in his great soft tiger-purr of a voice, "am the Goblin King!"

"Kin-n-n-nda had that one figured," Mabel said, surveying his thin face with its high cheekbones, sharp chin, interestingly slanted eyebrows (a wide V that gave his eyes a guarded yet sharp look), and his head of fascinatingly long and ragged blond hair. "So hi, I'm Mabel, this is T.K., who we call Teek, that means 'goblin slayer' in our language—"

"No it doesn't!" the Goblin King shot back, cocking his left hip and putting his left palm on it, like a lady in a Victoria's Secret commercial, or maybe one for a medicine to control an iffy bladder. "It's a pidgin English-Hindi word meaning 'feeling well,' or 'in good health!' As in 'You look teek today, Aakashi!' Or in street slang, it's a verb meaning 'to intentionally and frequently confuse someone in order to make them lose their temper!' Or if it's spelled t-e-a-k, it's a kind of dense hardwood frequently employed in boatbuilding, shower stalls, and other occasions demanding a waterproof substance."

" _Freeze!_ " snarled Teek, who had loaded and leveled the crossbow again.

"Now you're just teeking me!" the Goblin King growled. He struck a slightly different pose, left foot out front, heel raised, toe on the floor, right leg to the rear, knee flexed. He raised his chin and snapped his fingers at about the level of his eyes, and the weapon poofed into billows of pink vapor that smelled like parakeets.

"Whoa!" Mabel said, her voice full of admiration. "How do you, like, _do_ that? I used to be able to do something similar when I ruled Mabel Land—long story, I was the absolute _queen_ , except I called myself 'mayor'—but I didn't snap my fingers. I did it by clapping my hands over my head, like this."

She demonstrated, and suddenly Teek held not a crossbow, but a formidable jet-black Heckler & Koch MP5, one of the best-engineered submachine guns in the world, capable of firing 800 9-mm rounds per minute, except its banana magazine held a maximum of thirty, but it _could_ fire 800 a minute if it had them, and you have to admit that's pretty darned impressive.

A startled Teek flinched and dropped the firearm.

Contrary to narrative conventions, it did not go off.

"Stop that this instant!" snapped the Goblin King to Mabel. "You cannot perform magic in my realm!"

"Well, looks like I just did, sucka!" Mabel said. "Huh! Hey, Teek! If I'd known earlier, I could have just zapped us to wherever Little Soos is. Let me try—"

Hastily, the Goblin King shouted, "NO! No, no, no! No, you don't! I hereby pass a new law: No one but me is able to use magic or to cause things to appear or vanish in my castle." He snapped his fingers and the submachine gun morphed into a bright-green gecko that briefly attempted to sell them insurance, to no avail. It crept off into a corner, defeated.

"Here you go, little guy!" Mabel carefully picked the lizard up and helped it up to the ledge of the room's one open window, and looking grateful, it scuttled out into the yellow sunlight. Then she turned back to the tall man. "Now, look, Goblin King—wait a minute, that's crazy, you can't be that. You're not even a goblin."

The Goblin King stood straighter and insisted, "Yes, I am!"

"No, you're not!" Teek said. "Goblins are fat and round and stupid and smelly!"

"I'm a goblin by abduction!" he said, beginning to look irritated. Well, _more_ irritated. Irritation was his ground state.

Mabel shook her head. "Yeah, Teek's right! You can't be a goblin by aberration, or whatever you said, and also if you were the king, you'd use the royal _we!_ And you'd be a real actual goblin! And you're not!"

"Well—I— _we_ could be one if I wanted to be!"

"Who in his right mind would want _that?_ " Mabel asked. "From what we've seen, goblins are third-rate toad skins stretched over globs of rancid animated chicken fat! Yuck!" Then in a coo, she added, "No, sweetie, stay just the way you are. I gotta admit, you're _hot_ as a human, but as a goblin you'd be like, _blarrgggh_!" She mimed sticking a finger down her throat.

Looking unsure about whether or not he'd been complimented, the Goblin King unbent enough to say, "Well, ah, thank you—as to species, you must understand that the goblins _abducted_ me long ago from my father and mother and raised me as one of their own to be their king—"

"Must be where the Gnomes picked up the habit," Mabel told Teek. "They wanted to make me their queen, but they got a badger instead. I'm OK with that. She's nice."

"I am _trying_ to explain!" the Goblin King said.

Mabel turned back to him, stabbing her finger at him. "So that's why you want Little Soos! You're gonna make him your heir! Boy, have you got the wrong guy. Take a look at his dad, and you'll see he's not cut out for kinging, gene-wise. Maybe he could be the castle maintenance guy or the handyman, but king? Whoa, babes, you got a wrong number _that_ time! You need to shop around more. Take my advice, find a prep school for snooty rich guys to find your heir. Nice hair, by the way!"

"I have no need for an heir! I do not intend to resign, and I'm still young! For a goblin, I mean! And thanks for mentioning the hair, it takes simply ages to get it right. What was I saying? Oh, yes, I was simply—wait a minute, you're deliberately confusing the issue! Mortals, why have you come unto this—"

"To get Little Soos and bring him back home!" Mabel said. "Let's cut to the chase here."

He stared at her, unbelief written on his face (that is a metaphor; actually it was an eye-bugging, eyebrow-raised, wrinkle-browed expression that clearly said either "I don't believe you!" or, more colloquially, "Say whaaaa-?" No actual script on his flesh.). "You didn't let me finish!"

In exchange, Mabel tilted her head and gave him her squinty-eyed "are you for real?" look. "What, did I commit _noblesse oblige_?" She wriggled her fingers like Stan always did when he was being sarcastic about some fancy-pants word or idea.

The Goblin King seemed to puff himself up like an indignant owl on the evening of January 20.* "You certainly did—no, wait, you didn't! You couldn't, because noblesse oblige refers to the responsibility of the upper classes to behave well toward their inferiors!"

* * *

* _January 20 is the evening before the feast day of St. Agnes, and according to John Keats's poem "The Eve of St. Agnes," the coldest day imaginable. Take a read. Keats was better at poems than titles._

* * *

"You sure?" Mabel asked, her expression dubious. "Then what was I thinking of?"

Sounding frantic, the Goblin King said, "I don't know! Um, perhaps _lèse-majesté!_ "

"Doesn't sound right," Mabel insisted. "What's it mean?"

"It means teeking with a king!" the Gnome King exploded. "Like acting as though you knew what I was going to ask when you clearly could not have. Known. That!"

Mabel put her hands on her hips and stared him down. "Yeah? OK, Mr. Smarty, you were gonna ask 'Why have you come unto this my realm, and what do you seek?'"

"No, I wasn't," said the Goblin King, pouting.

"Oh, really?" Mabel asked, her voice poisonously sweet, like glycyrrhizin**. "Then what were you going to say?"

* * *

_**I am not making this up. Glycyrrhizin is an acidic component of licorice root and is sweeter than sugar. Though in moderate amounts it can inhibit the growth of liver tumors, it is also toxic and in a large enough dose can cause death by stroke by spiking blood pressure to drastically elevated levels. The more you know, the further you go!_

* * *

The Goblin King muttered, "Was gonna ask you if you wanted to try to win the baby back, is all."

"Yes, we do!" Teek said. "And before we start that, return my clothes!"

Striking another pose—shoulders thrown back, head lowered, right arm pointing toward them sternly—the Goblin King said, "Then you must prove yourself worthy— _wait, what?_ "

Teek didn't flinch. "Your goblins stole my shoes and socks and shirt and pants!"

"And underwear!" Mabel added.

"Uh," Teek said, turning pink, "well, Mabel, uh, actually, uh . . . ."

Mabel hit him on the arm. "You were goin' _commando?_ Teek, you scapegrace! Oooh, that's so _hot_ , you bad boy, you!"

The Goblin King was turning pink, either from anger or from embarrassment or perhaps some unfortunate hybrid of the two. "Really, this is becoming quite tedious—"

Mabel clapped her hands together and rubbed them, like Grunkle Stan getting ready to fleece a rube. "Right, down to business. Where you got the baby stashed at, GK?"

The Goblin King attempted another pose, but apparently, he had run through his repertoire. He settled for crossing his arms across his chest and scowling. "That is disrespectful! You can't call me that!"

Mabel said, "Well, 'Goblin King' sounds dorky!"

"It does not!"

"Does, too!" Teek said loyally.

The king of all the goblins looked as though he were about to suffer an aneurysm. "No, it doesn't! Oh, wait, though. What does 'dorky' mean? 'Impressive?'"

"Guess again," Mabel said. "Look, call me Mabel, call him Teek, and what's your name? Come on, we're all friends here."

He recoiled as though having just sat down to a banquet and having the waiter uncover a dish of boiled unskinned rat. "No, we are not!"

"Just because you won't give us a chance!" Mabel said. "I'm very lovable when you get to know me! Aren't I, Teek!"

"She sure is!"

Mabel kissed his cheek. "Later, hon!"

The Goblin King ran one hand through his long, shaggy hair, undoing about two hours of work by a Goblin hairdresser.*** "Look, please, will you get to the point if I tell you my name?"

* * *

_***Goblins, even the females, have very little hair, but that does not prevent some of them from taking up the comb and shears and becoming adept at doing unto others what they can't do unto themselves. This is not unusual. Restaurants routinely hire cooks that have only a dim grasp of what heat does to food, and remember that history teacher you had who mixed up the dates of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War?_

* * *

"Yes!" both Teek and Mabel said in unison.

He sighed. "Very well. My name is Jahrkves."

Mabel fell to the floor, giggling like a rabid hyena and rolling around in a circle, her feet on the circumference, her head in the center. "Wah-hah!" she said at last, when she could finally talk. She sat up and wiped tears from her eyes. "Your name is _Jerkface? _"__

"Jahrkves!" corrected the Goblin King. "It's a very ancient and honorable name! I was born fourteen hundred and fourteen years ago, and—"

"Mazeltov!" Mabel said, jumping to her feet. "Ooh, what day?"

"—in the land where I was born, Jahrkves was a perfectly respectable name—what? August 31, by your modern era's calendar, but that's completely beside the—"

"No! Freaking! Way!" Mabel yelled. "Shut up! Me, too! And my brother! _We_ were born on August 31! What a coincidence!" She paddled her hands around each other between the two of them. "What is _happening_ here?"

"Really?" Teek asked her. "Last day of August?"

"Yeah, really!" Mabel said. "Oh, the party will be in the Shack, and you're invited, of course! Listen, all presents are gratefully accepted, but please, no perfume or anything that's scented, 'cause I have to be careful with my allergies. And you don't want to get Dipper started, he sneezes like a kitten—"

Jahrkves slapped a palm over his face. "I will say this only once!" he said. "I have the baby you seek! I hold him captive up in the topmost chamber of this tower! I will take one of you up—"

"Both of us!" Teek said, balling his fists, which were swelling a little. Goblin heads are not the softest things to punch.

" _THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!"_ Jahrkves thundered.

"You _can't_ take two, can you?" Mabel asked. "You're not strong enough!"

"I could too take both of you if I wanted to!" Jahkves said, stamping his foot.

"You're bluffing!" Mabel said. "As a magician, you suck!"

"I'm telling you I could!"

Mabel stuck her tongue out at him. "Nuh-uh!"

"I could, I could, I could!"

"Hah! Big talk! Maybe you can _prove_ it!"

"Well, maybe I will!"

"Yeah, I'll bet!"

The Gnome King's face was turning purple, like a nearly-ripe eggplant. "I could do it! I am deeply learned in the mystic ways, since I am fourteen hundred and fourteen years old—"

"Fourteen hundred and fifteen on the last day of August! Happy birthday!"

"Yes, well, um, thank you, but I was saying no man alive can match me in my knowledge of the tortuous ways of magic! I can call spirits from the vasty deep!"

"Name two!" Mabel snapped, interrupting him.

"—Bob and Ray! Where was I? For I have spent more than twelve hundred years studying the secrets of sorcery—"

Mabel giggled. "Man, your Social Security check must be _enormous!_ "

Despairing, Jahrkves turned to Teek. "Listen, boy, could I just take you? By yourself? Get away from her for a while? Just us guys? Please?"

Teek shook his head. "Then _I'd_ be in trouble with her, too. Look, dude, I feel you, but I think you'd better just give up and take us both."

A wise king knows when to retreat. Jahkves sighed and said, "Oh, very well!"

"Wait a minute!" Mabel said. "Give Teek back his clothes first! And make sure they're cleaned and pressed!"

"I'll do better than that," Jahkves said grimly. He snapped his fingers.

Teek's scarlet-and-saffron suit that Mabel had improvised from wall hangings vanished, replaced by a tight black T-shirt glittering with, on the back, small chrome studs spelling out "Born to Rune" and on the front a cool-looking bone-white appliqué of an evil skull that you just knew would glow in the dark.

And the jeans—oh, man, the _designer_ jeans, stretch denim, the legs slashed stylishly on the thighs and below the knees in just the right places, the seat hugging _his_ seat like a long-lost sister—ew, that didn't come out right, say tight as a second skin—and black biker boots with zippers and chrome chains and more studs, these ones pyramidal and flashing in the light.

"Oooh, so—so _tight!_ " Mabel said, stepping back and giving Teek a long, admiring gaze. "Mabel _like_!"

Jahkves sighed. "If you're quite ready, hold onto each other's—no, wait, you don't have to—I was going to say hold hands, but I suppose a full-body hug will do. Teenagers!" He snapped his fingers, and they all vanished simultaneously.

* * *

Dipper almost dropped the crystal ball. He had been cupping it in his left hand, catching the light from the window, and examining it through a six-inch magnifying glass.

He had noted its complete lack of scratches, its strange clarity, with no flaws, imperfections, or trapped bubbles—though it seemed to have polarizing qualities, because as he turned it, sometimes it darkened momentarily—and its unusually heavy feel, as if it were made of lead, not glass or crystal. Certainly it wasn't a polymer. Nothing man-made.

And then, as he revolved it, and too fast for him to be absolutely sure what he was seeing, Mabel and Teek momentarily resolved, as though he were looking through the ball at a photo—no, a movie of them.

They were hugging each other. Tightly. And spinning, as if flying through the air. Mabel had evidently leaped onto Teek and clung there like a healthy squirrel on a sickly little sapling, her arms wrapped around Teek—and also her legs, with her heels tucked into the hollows behind his knees! And he was wearing the tightest jeans that Dipper had seen since the time Robbie Valentino had the accident with the big tub of scalding hot water at the world's cheapest carnival.

It was just an instantaneous flicker, clear and then gone, but Dipper clenched the crystal tight enough to break it if he'd had the strength of Superman. He didn't, so nothing happened.

"Mabel," Dipper said aloud, "what have you got yourself into now?"

The ball did not answer, which was probably just as well, because Dipper didn't feel like he could take another vision like that last one.

Oh, when he got hold of Mabel and Teek, he'd ask them both for an explanation, and he'd give Teek every benefit of the doubt, but if Teek was becoming another Trey Moulter—

_No, no, no, he told himself. The first thing to do, the important thing to do, is find some way to get Mabel back!_

_THEN I can kill Teek, if necessary._

 

* * *

**Chapter 9**

"You can get off him now," Jahrkves said coldly.

"Just five more minutes," Mabel said, still clinging to Teek and snuggled up to that incredibly cool T-shirt.

"Uh—Mabel? There's Little Soos right over there," Teek said.

"Soosie!" She sprang off him and whirled. Sure enough, Little Soos, looking happy enough, sat on a rug in the, well, not corner, it was a circular room, but in the niche between a window seat—window above it wide open, hundreds of feet above the ground, nothing to keep the kid from clambering up and dropping to his death—but he was too busy playing with what looked like a pile of goblin bones, drumming on a small skull with a small tibia.

"Not so fast!" The Goblin King snapped his fingers, and Mabel felt the air congeal to something like taffy. She could make no headway and came to a halt leaning forward at a fifty-degree angle.

"What gives?" she demanded, struggling to stand up straight. "Little Soos is ours!"

"That remains to be seen. We must play the game—"

Mabel stared at the child. "You're letting him play with _bones?_ That's unsanitary!"

Teek sniffed the air. "To be fair, so is Little Soos."

"They're not _real_ bones!" the Goblin King said. "They're made of plastic! They're from a kit that teaches little goblins about basic anatomy!"

"That's disgusting!" Mabel said.

"Well, there don't happen to be any toy shops around here that sell _human_ toys!" Jahrkves told her. "Really, we do the best we can, it's never appreciated!"

"Amazon has, like, same-day delivery," Teek pointed out helpfully.

"Yes, well," Jahrkves said in a sulky tone, "they only carry toys for females!"

"No, they don't!" Mabel said.

"The Amazons _here_ do!" Jahrkves made a visible effort to control his temper. "All right. All right. We're going to play a game. The winner gets the baby!"

"Rock, paper, scissors!" Mabel said, sticking out her hand. "Gimme a rock! One about the size of a baseball should do it!"

"No!" the Goblin King told her. "Listen. We shall go to opposite corners—"

"Circular room, no corners," Teek said. "The narrator just said that a few paragraphs ago."

_(I am astounded at his politeness. It's so rare that we narrators are even noticed. I mean, we slave away at the keyboard, trying to provide interesting plots and verisimilitude and all, and the characters never ever even think of us, not once! Thank you, Teek.)_

"What—you—what narrat—what are you even _talking_ about?" Jahrkves demanded. "Have I taken crazy pills?"

Mabel explained, "He's _pretending_ that we're in a story, 'cause he has this theory that narrative conventions are this world's natural laws."

"Yeah," Teek said with a shrug. "It was just imaginary. There's not really a narrator."

_(Oh, thank you SO much! Imaginary, am I? You know, I COULD have a swarm of rabid winged crocodiles come flying through that open window right this second if I wanted to! Oh, wait. Got to look something up, just be a moment. I'm back. Huh. Only mammals get rabies. Who knew? Where were we, anyway? Oh, right, to build up tension, we were about to abandon the scene in the tower and cross-cut to Dipper. Three dramatic chords! Flash cut!)_

* * *

Dipper, waiting for his great-uncle Ford to answer the phone, started at something and frantically looked all around the attic room. Then he heard Stanford's voice: "Hello, Dipper! I'm planning to drive over there later—"

"Hi, Grunkle Ford! Hey, did you hear that?"

"What? I heard my computer phone ring."

"No, sounded almost like, I dunno, music? Chords? Dum-da-DUMM! Dramatic, you know? Never mind, not important. Listen, I've got this crystal ball I want to ask you about."

Ford sounded immediately interested: "Is it unusual?"

"It . . . might be. This is Gravity Falls, right? I have it right here. It's maybe two or three inches in diameter, very clear, and I think it's real crystal, not some polymer and not glass. It's a kind of yellow, I guess? Little more orangey than lemony, but definitely a yellow?"

"Hm. That sounds vaguely familiar. Early in my research career, I did collect several such artifacts. The majority of them were just replicas and glass imitations, of course. Some nice quartz spheres, though, particularly one rose-quartz. I wonder what Stanley did with those. But this one's yellow? Where did you find it?"

Dipper explained. "Must have come from the Shack, then," Ford said. Yellow, yellow . . . there's something nagging at my memory. Let me see. Oh! Citrine, of course!"

"Citrine?"

"It's a mineral," Ford said, and Dipper realized he was about to launch into exposition. "A variety of quartz, some of it—especially specimens from Spain—almost matching the color of topaz. I _do_ remember collecting a crystal globe of citrine, oh, more than thirty-five years ago! I was still in grad school, and I ran into a traveling carnival. The fortune-teller was retiring and had a tent sale—would have been a garage sale, but she didn't have a car—and I picked that up for a hundred dollars. I had to eat ramen noodles for a week after that! Anyway, the fortune-teller warned me that it was in tune with another reality. That was an interest of mine, the possibility of alternate realities, I mean, but as far as I could tell, it was merely a fine specimen of pure citrine."

"Could it have caused something weird?" Dipper asked. "Because Mabel, Teek, and Little Soos seem to have disappeared."

"Hmm. The maiden, the hero, and the child. Characters out of classic fairy tales. Could it be that to trigger the crystal's powers all three had to be in one place at one time with the citrine globe?"

"I . . . don't know," Dipper said.

Ford chuckled. "That was rhetorical, Dipper. Just talking to myself. It's a habit I picked up while traveling between dimensions. I'll come over right away. Oh—do you mind if I bring a lady friend?"

"No, of course not," Dipper said.

"Good, good. I'll phone her and we'll probably just meet there at the Shack. Or is parking going to be a problem?"

"Not yet, but later when the barbecue begins—"

"Good point. I'll park around back, near the totem pole. I'll see you in half an hour."

The moment Dipper hung up, his phone rang, and the musical ring identified the caller as Wendy!

"Hi!" he said.

"Dude, are you like in trouble?" she asked, sounding worried. "I just had this odd kinda tingle."

"Not me, but I think Mabel is. Probably," Dipper said. He hurriedly explained.

"Oh, man! She's missing, and so is Little Soos? I'll bet Soos and Melody are going crazy!"

"No, because they don't know about it yet," Dipper said.

"Then don't tell them. Listen, I think Dad's had about as much of Aunty as anybody can take. I'll get him and my brothers into the pickup and we'll be back in Gravity Falls in less than an hour. I'll get Dad to swing by the Shack and let me out—say I'm gonna help with the barbecue. Later I guess Stan or somebody can give me a ride home."

"Sure!" Dipper said. "Please hurry. I need you!"

"Aw," Wendy said. "Hang in there, Big Dipper. I'll be there ASAP!"

Dipper hung up and put the crystal ball on his table in the slant of light from the triangular window. He leaned over and peered into its depths. "Show me Mabel," he murmured. "I want to see my sister. Show me Mabel Pines!"

Nothing happened.

He sighed and pulled his laptop toward him, fired it up, opened a browser, and began to look up the qualities, physical and mystical, of citrine.

* * *

"Fine!" the Goblin King roared. "Mabel will stand against the wall, _there!_ I will stand against the other wall—"

"Only one wall in a circular room," Teek said.

"You tell him, sweetie!" Mabel cheered.

"If it had a half-twist, it would also be a wall with only one side. A Möbius wall," Teek continued.

"What good is a wall with only one side?" Jahrkves sounded like a man clinging to reality by one fingernail.

"Save on paint," Mabel suggested.

The Goblin King counted to ten, very slowly. He took two deep breaths. "Mabel will stand _there,_ right, and I will stand, diametrically opposite her, against the wall over _here!_ "

"What's the diameter of this room?" Teek asked.

"The dia—I don't know! I'd have to check the blueprints!"

"We'll wait," Mabel said.

"I—don't—know—where—the—blueprints—ARE!" he growled between clenched teeth. "Last I saw of them, they were tucked in a sticky drawer in a disused pantry about two hundred floors under us!"

"Tower's not that tall," Mabel pointed out.

"It's quantum, all right? Anyway—here. You, Teek, YOU take this piece of chalk—" he snapped his fingers and a big chunk of sidewalk chalk (yellow, does it even merit mentioning?) appeared in his hand. He gave it to Teek. "—right, and draw a straight line from one wall to the opposite spot on the SAME wall, and Mabel will stand at one end of the chalk line, and I'll stand at the other, and the baby will be in the center. EVERYBODY HAPPY?"

"I think Little Soos would be happier if I changed his diaper," Mabel said. "But I've misplaced the diaper bag. I think I might have left it at the mad tea party. Want me to go back and get it?"

Jahrkves closed his eyes. "Round table, middle of a clearing, a chocolate cake eating all the other treats?"

"Sounds right," Teek said.

"Fabric bag, over-the-shoulder handle, brightly colored pattern of flowers—daisies, I believe?"

"That's it," Mabel said.

The Goblin King snapped his fingers, and the bag appeared in a poof of smoke. Yes, the smoke was yellow. Stop bugging me about colors, please. Just assume yellow.

Neither Teek nor the Goblin King wanted to watch the process of diaper change (few men ever do), so they stepped to the window and gazed out over the countryside, the breeze fresh and piny-smelling in their faces.

"Really nice view," Teek said.

"Thank you," the Goblin King said. "I chose the hill because of that. I remember when all that was just woods."

"It's still just woods."

"Yes, well, I remember when it was different trees."

"It's a lot like our world," Teek said. "I mean, you see that waterfall over there?"

"I like a water feature, don't you?" Jahrkves said. "It's . . . calming. And sometimes I need calming."

"We have the same waterfall. We call it Gravity Falls Falls."

"That's peculiar."

"Well, the valley is Gravity Falls Valley. I think the waterfall was discovered after the valley, so it got the double name."

"Makes sense, I suppose. We call it Goblin Valley Falls."

"Anybody live in the valley other than goblins?"

Jahrkves shrugged. "Of course. Gnomes and centaurs. Fauns and fairies, a few assorted monsters, a few humans—wizards and witches, mainly. Everyone gets along. Live and let live, you know."

"Kind of that way in our valley, too," Teek said. "Didn't use to be. We humans are in the majority there. For a long time, we ignored all the magical creatures."

"Well, that's a kind of accommodation, too," Jahrkves said.

"Yeah, but our world almost ended a couple years back, and since then, the supernatural creatures have sort of come out of the closet."

"How many ARE there?"

"Hundreds of thousands, I guess."

"How big are human closets?"

"All done!" Mabel said. "OK, where does Little Soos sit?"

"I've actually enjoyed several phrases of our chat," the Goblin King said to Teek. To Mabel, he added, "Let Teek decide where the middle is and put him there."

Teek drew the line and stepped off the paces: Nineteen from Mabel's spot to the opposite end, which was a good number because it meant he could pace nine steps from Mabel's side, make a cross mark, then pace off nine steps from Jahrkves's side and make another, and right between the cross marks Little Soos sat.

"What did you do with the dirty diaper?" Jahrkves asked.

"It's in a sealed baggie," Mabel said. "You can toss it in the trash later."

"I'll have a goblin do it."

"Whatever."

They went to their corners, sorry, force of habit, I mean their opposite points on the line, bowed to each other, and Jahrkves said, "Rules. Neither of us can move from our spots before the baby comes to one of us. We can entice the child with words and gestures and any props we may have. Teek will remain against the wall over there, neutral, and not speak or urge the child in any way. The one that the child creeps to is the winner."

"What happens to the loser?" Teek asked.

"If you lose, you become—hm. No, I don't think I'd want you as kitchen slaves. In fact, I don't want Mabel at all. I'd have a nervous breakdown. All right, if you lose, I just tell you how to get back home and let you go, but I keep the child."

"And what if _you_ lose?" Mabel asked.

"Then I lose the child."

"That's not fair!" Teek said.

"It's the same for both of us!"

"Yeah, but we get sent home. You're already _at_ home," Mabel pointed out. "If you lose, you have to send us AND the baby home safely. And, um, increase government spending for goblin art education programs! By twenty-five per cent! And if it's nothing now, double that percentage!"

"Fine, all right," Jahrkves said. "Anything else?"

"Can't think of anything," Teek said nervously.

"Hmm," Mabel said. "Look, GK, I may have said some mean things to you before, but I'm upset about your taking the baby, is all. I apologize for hurting your feelings, OK? And I gotta tell you: you're rockin' those tight pants, dude! And your hairstyle is to die for! And, oh yeah, thanks for decking my guy out in these threads. I'll say this for you—you got _style!"_

Jahrkves smiled. Softly, he said, "You know, Mabel, if conditions were quite different, I would take you as my queen and my bride."

"Hey!" Teek said.

"What conditions?" Mabel asked, sounding intrigued.

"Well," Jahrkves said, "to begin with, I'd have to be completely insane. Ready? We begin in three . . . two . . . one . . . NOW!"

* * *

**Chapter 10**

"Dipper? You down here?"

Dipper and Ford had been bent over the crystal ball when they heard Wendy's voice. Dipper ran out of the lab room and said, "You got here fast!"

"Yeah," Wendy said. "Stan opened that crazy hidden door for me. So Ford's still using his lab, huh?"

"From time to time," Ford said from behind Dipper. "Come on in, Wendy, and don't touch anything."

Looking around as she stepped into the lab room, Wendy said, "Man, this reminds me so much of the bunker!"

"Grunkle Ford built that, too," Dipper explained. He pulled out a tall chair for Wendy beside the lab bench on which the crystal ball gleamed.

Wendy blinked. "Oh. Uh, Dr. Pines, I kinda took the fallout shelter sign from your bunker. If you want it back—"

"Fine, fine," Ford said, settling back on his own lab stool and carefully adjusting several goose-necked chrome-plated lamps, each with a different type of light bulb, around the tripod stand on which the crystal ball rested.

"He means you can keep it," Dipper translated. "He gets sort of wrapped up in these things when he's working. How'd you get here so fast?"

Wendy shrugged. "The cops pulled Dad over just as we left the hospital. The boys were ridin' in the bed of the truck, and that's illegal for minors, so he got a ticket. I let my brothers sit in the cab, and I got in the truck bed—you can ride there if you're not a minor, and just from lookin' at me, everybody thinks I'm older than I am—and Dad tore up the road between there and here, he was so mad about the ticket. It's a wonder he didn't get nailed for speeding, too."

"I'm glad you got here safely. Too bad the police spotted him."

Wendy smiled in a cat-like way. "Yeah, strange how that works. Apparently, some nosy person phoned in a tip to the cops to watch out for him just before we left the hospital."

"You didn't—"

Wendy zipped her lips and flicked away the imaginary key. "Wanted to get here fast, dude. So, what's this deal?"

Dipper explained about the crystal ball and the short glimpse he'd had of Teek and Mabel.

Ford, overhearing, muttered something about resonances and dimensionality. "I believe," he finished, "that if I can hit this orb with the right combinations of light frequencies, we may be able to use it as a one-way viewer and focus in on Mabel. She's inside the orb."

"No freakin' way!" Wendy exclaimed.

Ford corrected that: "No, I don't mean she's actually shrunk down and is inside it. Not literally. But she _is_ in a slightly different dimensional plane from us, and the crystal is attuned to that plane of existence. It's probably not even a completely different dimension, not like the ones I visited on my travels, but a parasite dimension attached to this one, with its own set of space-time laws. We cannot directly communicate with it, but this orb can produce images of what's happening there. All right, put on your goggles!"

"Uh, we don't _have_ any goggles," Dipper said.

"Fine, fine," Ford said, lowering plastic safety goggles over his glasses, and he flicked a switch.

With a low him the six gooseneck lamps flared on—and shone infrared, ultraviolet, wave-phase adjusted, syncopated, inverted, and null-photonic light on the orb, all at the same time. It shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow, except for red, orange, green, blue, and violet.

"Something's happening," Wendy said. The light reflecting from the globe pulsated slowly.

"Mm," Ford agreed. "Oh, by the way, Wendy, did you see Lorena upstairs? I'd meant to introduce her to everyone—"

"She's up shooting the breeze with Stan," Wendy said. "Bunch of the early barbecue guests are milling around, buying stuff already. And Mrs. Jones was born here and knows everybody in town. She's a nice lady."

"She is indeed. Ah, the vibration pattern is intensifying. I believe something is happening. Look closely, and don't remove your goggles!"

Dipper cleared his throat nervously. "Uh, Grunkle Ford, you never gave us any—"

"It's happening!"

Dipper saw a scene not exactly inside the crystal, more superimposed on the air around it and so transparent that he could see through the objects and people that shimmered in the vision: As if looking down from the ceiling of a round room, he made out a strangely-dressed, slender, tall man in a black cutaway coat with a frill at the neck and the tightest gray pants that Dipper had ever seen.

The thin-faced man with shaggy blond hair stood against one wall, and Mabel stood with her back against the wall opposite him. Teek was off to one side, and on the floor Little Soos crawled slowly but steadily toward the man with the shaggy blond hair. He had almost reached him—

* * *

"No fair!" Mabel said. "You used magic!"

"It's a _prop,_ " the Goblin King said, grinning and jangling the key ring he had summoned from thin air. "Props are allowed! And I didn't _create_ it, I just took it by magic from the hook on the wall beside the back door downstairs."

Cooing and gurgling, Little Soos crept on hands and knees toward the Goblin King. Still about six feet away from him, just out of reach, the baby sat up, looked at the jingly keys, and clapped his hands and laughed.

"Keys are like baby magnets!" Teek said. "Mabel, think of something!"

"I didn't want to do this," Mabel said, reaching inside her sweater. "Grappling hook!"

The grapnel* whizzed across the room, and before Jahrkves could even react, it snagged the keyring and yanked it right out of his grasp. Mabel retracted the grapnel, the keys fell off, but following Newton's first law of motion they continued their arc, and with her free hand she reached up to grab them out of the air—

* * *

* _Yes, "grapnel" is a real word. It's a small anchor-like device with three or more flukes** and is the grappling part of a grappling hook, the thing on the end of the line that actually grapples._

_**A fluke can be a digenetic trematode—that's a kind of flatworm, check it out on Google, I'm not adding ANOTHER bloody footnote, too many of them already; or it can be an unlikely, random, odd or chance occurrence, like the kid that you have a secret crush on walking up to you one day as math class is ending and saying very earnestly, "I need to get some serious French kissing practice in right away, are you busy tonight?"; or it could be the tail fins of a whale or dolphin***, or, AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT BIT, it's the part of an anchor with an arrowhead-like hook on it that catches in the sea floor—or, by extension, the parts of a grapnel with hooks that catch on the tops of walls, tree branches, or, rarely, dangling keychains._

_***One kind of dolphin is actually a fish, another kind is a spar or buoy used for mooring boats, but most commonly the word refers to relatively small aquatic mammals that, in fact, are compact-sized toothed whales.****_

_**** Oh, damn, that was another footnote when I said I wouldn't do one. Can't you please look some of this crap up yourself? Help a brother out!_

* * *

The Goblin King snapped his fingers and the keys vanished before she could touch them. "I hung them back up where they belong, Miss Malapert!"

Mabel glared at him. "What's that even mean?"

"Malapert? Um, impudent person." When she just looked at him, he sighed. "Smarty pants? Know-it-all? Wisenheimer?"

Mabel smiled a little. "Oh, sorry, I thought it was something bad."

"If I can't use the keys, you certainly can't!" he shouted. He started to coo at the baby. "Come to me, my fine little man! Come to the lovely Goblin King!"

"Hey, Soosie!" Mabel called. "Would you like to go for a ride on Waddles? Hmm? Would you like that? What does Waddles say? What does he say? What does the piggie say?"

Little Soos, two-thirds of the way to the Goblin King, sat up and looked around at Mabel, gurgling and drooling and perhaps saying "oink."

The Goblin King snapped his fingers and suddenly held a gold-and-silver music box. It tinkled a lovely lullaby, and the baby's gaze swiveled toward it.

Mabel began to sing and do a dance-in-place: "Am I blanchin'? Girl, we blanchin'! I live up in a mansion!"

The baby swung around and started to crawl toward her.

"Ugh!" Jahrkves said, making the music box vanish. "Now I'll have _that_ in my head for the next hundred years!"

* * *

"I believe we're watching a competition of some sort," Ford said. "I suspect that the creature that looks as though his head got caught in a hay baler—"

"C'mon, man," Wendy said, "He's kinda _hot!_ "

"Oh," Dipper said.

With a note of apology in her voice, Wendy added, "Well, not to me _personally_ , too weedy, but I can see how Mabel might be attracted."

"Oh." Dipper said.

Wendy turned back toward the vision shimmering in the air around the orb. "Or even Teek, maybe. 'Cause this guy is, like, equal-opportunity hot—"

"I'm not understanding any of this," Ford said.

"Good," Dipper told him. Wendy stifled a giggle.

Ford resumed, "Anyway, I think that the, uh, man, I guess, is trying to abduct Soos's son and that the contest is to find whether the baby will go to him or to Mabel. I think I can even make out a chalk mark on the floor there between them."

"I wish we could get sound on this!" Dipper said. "Is there any way to help Mabel?"

Ford shrugged. "Improbable. Without the right combination of people on this side, we can't open the gateway into the parasite dimension. And I suspect that the orb's capacity is limited—only one group of three at a time. Hero, maiden, and child. It's classic."

"Scientific reasoning?" Wendy asked.

"Gut feeling. All we can do . . . is watch."

"Come on, Mabel!" Dipper said, leaning forward. "You can do it!"

* * *

The Goblin King was juggling three live pug puppies, who seemed to enjoy it.

Little Soos, still in the same place where he had stopped, watched in awe. Or at least he said, "Aw." Hard to tell with kids that young. He also started sucking his whole right fist.

The puppies vanished. With an evil smile, the Goblin King produced a six-foot long, live, bronze-colored snake from thin air, its hexagonal scales gleaming. It coiled around his neck and arm, the triangular head rearing from the final coil around his wrist, black forked tongue flickering like a small streak of infernal lightning. "Mustn't touch," Jahrkves cooed. "Stay away!"

Mabel clenched her fists. The Goblin King was trying reverse psychology—something she'd often used on Little Soos herself: "Don't fall asleep now!" "I know you're not hungry, so I'll eat this baby food myself!"

And it almost always worked!

"I didn't want to do this," she muttered. "It's really fighting dirty. But I guess I have to." Then she shouted out, "Hey, Soosie! Who wants _bacon?_ "

The Goblin King knew nothing of Soos or of the baby's parentage. He didn't know that Melody had been a dedicated employee of Meat Cute or that Soos had once cooked an entire pound of bacon for Stan and the kids and not one strip of it had made it to the table, because he'd forked each one still sizzling into his own mouth, straight out of the frying pan. The Goblin King had no idea of the inexorable combination of genes in the baby he was trying to attract.

"No!" he shouted. "Come back!"

But Little Soos was already at Mabel's feet, reaching up both chubby arms. She scooped him up.

"Yes!" Teek said.

The baby started to cry. "Ba-ba!" he whimpered. "Ba! Ba!"

Jouncing him, Mabel said, "Um, GK, I won't boast about winning, but this is an emergency, and I'm gonna need one small strip of bacon, not too crisp. A real one, not a magic one. Cough it up or get ready for a tantrum."

With an irritated grunt, the king snapped his fingers and one appeared. Mabel snagged it out of the air before it dropped, and Little Soos started to suck on it. He never ate them, but he did like the taste.

"Mabel won! Send us back home," Teek said, walking over to Mabel.

"I can't," the Goblin King said.

"What?" Mabel's face turned purple. "You _lied_ to us?"

"No! No!" the Goblin king said. "I can't magic you back to your home, but I _can_ tell you how to get there. Come with me." He snapped his fingers again, and a spiral stairway wound itself around the round wall of the room. At the top, a door popped open, revealing the yellow-and-black streaked sky of this world.

"Couldn't you afford a handrail?" Mabel asked. "Safety first!"

"You can't fall off. It's _magic,_ " the king said. "Congratulations."

"First time you've been beaten?" Teek asked.

Looking over his shoulder—he had started up the stairway—Jahrkves said as though surprised at the question, "Oh, no. I'm beaten every time. I'm the villain. It's a rule of nature."

"Narrative convention," Teek said.

"But I'm usually not beaten _this_ easily," Jahrkves said. "I mean, you two got through all the defenses with practically no effort. Knife through butter. Never have I ever known this to happen."

"First time you met Mabel," Teek said.

They ascended the stair and came out on a narrow parapet enclosing the very top of the tower, a roof like an egg-shaped dome with a flattened top. Mabel blinked. The interior of the heavens looked concave here, an immense dome over everything, near enough almost to stretch up and touch.

Her acrophobia set in. She ignored it. But her knees were shaking.

"Up on the central platform," the king said, and he led them up another set of steep stairs, practically a ladder, to a round dais atop the dome, the highest point of, well, everything they could see, including the castle. "Now, join hands. Ready to go? Teek, you're taller. Kiss the sky."

"What?" Teek asked. "No!"

Gasping for breath, Mabel squeezed his hand. "Do it."

"I'm not going to do that!"

"For me," Mabel pled. "Please."

"Oh—I won't like it! But OK."

And he turned to the astonished Jahrkves and planted one right on his lips.

* * *

**Chapter 11**

"Get back!" Ford yelled, pushing himself away from the lab table. "I think it's going to blow!"

The crystal ball flared and surged with intense light, like lightning trying to escape from a goldfish bowl. Dipper could hear things on the lab shelves vibrating. "Turn off the lamps, man!" Wendy yelled.

Dipper pulled Wendy off her lab stool and pushed her to the floor, covering her with his body and throwing his arm around her. "Cover your head!'

"Dude!"

Up on the lab bench, with a final flare of energy—

Teek, Mabel, and Little Soos poofed into existence—all of them on the edge of the table. "Whoa!" Mabel yelled, clutching the baby and beginning to topple.

"I got you!" Teek shouted, grabbing her.

As a result, they all three fell off, but together—and between them, they kept Little Soos from hitting the floor and didn't land too hard themselves. "Why'd you do that?" Mabel yelled, scrambling to her feet, still holding onto the baby, who was giggling in a let's-do-that-again way.

"I was trying to keep you from falling!" Teek yelled, struggling to stand up. His jeans were _tight._

"Are you all right?" Ford asked.

"Mabel!" Dipper yelled, jumping up and hugging his sister, who ignored him.

Wendy pushed up from the floor, dusted herself off, and waved at Teek. "'Sup, dude? Kickin' threads, T.K.!"

"I didn't mean _just now!_ " Mabel yelled at Teek. "Why'd you kiss Jerkface?"

Teek stared at her through his round specs. "You told me to!"

"I _did not_! He said to kiss the sky!"

Teek blinked. "I thought he said 'this guy!'"

"Well, _I_ kissed the sky and got us home!" Mabel paused. "Um. How was it?"

Teek blinked and made a yeck face. "He was a _dude!_ "

"Yeah," Mabel sighed.

"Mabel," Dipper said, releasing his hug. "What the heck happened?"

"Later," she said. "Where are we? Oh, the lab. I gotta run upstairs and put Soosie to bed and get Widdles out of it! Where's the diaper bag?"

Ford gingerly bent forward and touched the citrine globe, which had calmed down and apparently was not hot enough to singe his fingertip. He reached to the floor and brought up the floral bag. "Is this it?"

"Yes! Thanks! Back in a second!" Mabel grabbed the diaper bag in one hand, put Soosie on her hip with the other, and hurried up the stairs.

"So," Dipper said to Teek, "exactly what have you and my sister been up to?"

"It started with this thing," Teek said, pointing to the crystal ball, which Ford now held in his six-fingered hand. "Mabel asked Stan if I could have something . . . . "

Before he'd finished, Mabel had come back, without pig or baby. She chipped in some information about the end game. "And then genius here grabbed onto the king and smooched him!" she finished. "I thought G.K. was gonna turn us into hop-toads or something, so I took hold of the back of Teek's shirt and stretched up and kissed the inside of the dome, and everything turned inside-out, and here we are!"

"Mm-hmm," Dipper said. "And did you two smooch _each other_ much?"

"Dipper!" Wendy said, laughing.

"There wasn't time!" Teek said. "And I told you why Mabel jumped up and grabbed onto me and wrapped her le—herself around me. We were going to be magically transported!"

"Wait, wait, wait, Brobro!" Mabel said, turning hotly to Dipper. "You are worried about me _kissing_ somebody? When you're all the time kissing—"

"I think I need to go see how Lorena is," Ford said hastily. "You kids just . . . lock up behind you. Oh, and I'll take the crystal ball. I think it should be kept safe somewhere. T.K., feel free to take something else from the shop. I'll pay for whatever it is, no limit." He tucked the citrine ball into his pocket and left in a hurry.

As soon as he had gone, Dipper said hotly, "Wendy and I do not kiss _all_ the time!"

"Yeah," Wendy added mischievously, raising a suggestive eyebrow. "We do _other_ stuff, too."

"Wendy!" But Dipper couldn't help laughing.

"Come here, Teek!" Mabel said defiantly. She pulled him against her. "Mmmm!"

"Mabel!" Dipper yelled. Teek couldn't speak, his lips being otherwise occupied.

"Hey, Dip?" Wendy said, turning him around. She leaned in. "Mmmm!"

It's funny how a little public display of affection can cool an otherwise fraught situation. By the time the four teens came upstairs, Mabel was holding hands with Teek, Dipper with Wendy, and they were laughing and joking.

* * *

The barbecue had started, and a few minutes later, Melody went inside to check on Little Soos, found him awake, and brought him out. Everyone oohed and aahed over how much he'd grown and how smart he was.

Dipper, Mabel, and Teek got busy helping serve people. Wendy murmured, "My day off, dudes," and she wandered off and found Ford and Lorena sitting together on a tablecloth on the lawn. "Join you?" she asked.

They said sure. She sat down, they chatted a bit, and after a few minutes Lorena tactfully said, "I'm going to get another drink. Bring anyone anything?"

"No, thank you, dear," Ford said.

"I'm fine, thanks, Mrs. Jones," Wendy told her.

When she had walked away, Wendy sighed. "Dude, what were those crazy lamps plugged into? I saw that gizmo—it wasn't a regular electric outlet, but kinda a silver ball in the middle of an octagon of outlets. And it wasn't hooked up to anything!"

"Hmm? Oh, that's something I picked up the design for in Dimension 46-MT. A zero-point energy extractor. It collects free energy and transforms it into unlimited electricity."

"Dr. Pines!" Wendy said. "That can make you rich! I mean, super-rich!"

Ford shrugged. "I don't think I'll patent it or release the design to the public. It occurs to me that the more energy humanity controls, the worse the wars get. Maybe as a species we're not yet ready to handle that kind of power. So, I keep my little prototype just to supply electricity for those special devices that most require it in the lab."

"Oh."

After a moment of silence, Ford asked kindly, "What's wrong, Wendy?"

She sighed. "Shows, huh? I dunno. I'm feeling—well, not right. See, up to two years ago, all I wanted to do was hang with my friends, avoid school, and get in trouble. My dad, like, hated me for a while there. But since I've started feeling, you know, affectionate with Dipper—I'm trying to change, but maybe I can't. You know when we were under that—naiad?—naiad's spell or whatever, he and I were in each other's heads, but now we're not any more. But now I know how strong he really feels about me. I'm getting there with him, I mean as far as returning his affection and all, but—I worry. I'm so afraid that I'm gonna disappoint him one day."

"I don't think that's possible," Ford said with a smile. "Is it the age thing?"

"Yeah, I guess it is," she sighed. "Not even three years, really, but it feels like more than that. And we have to wait for three years from his _next_ birthday before we can tell anybody! It's kinda difficult to, you know, stay within bounds when we're together, and I don't know if we can hold out—not when we're apart for most of the year. I mean, I'm not interested in any guys but him, but—well, he's still growing up, he's bound to run into other girls—geez, Dr. Pines, why don't you invent a pill that could make me the same age as him?"

"Ah, an ancient dream of mankind's," Ford said, smiling. "I'm afraid there's no such pill. If there was, I'd take it myself. I'm twenty-six years older than Lorena. Stanley is twenty-eight years older than Sheila Remley. Still, we're not calling off our, well, relationships, and we're reasonably happy. I think you and Dipper can handle three little years, and when he's college age, the difference really won't matter at all."

"I hope so," Wendy said. "But you know, Dipper is still younger than me not just in years, but in so many ways. Like he got so mad about Teek and Mabel, but they're just having an ordinary teen romance. If I was their age—maybe it wouldn't seem so heavy."

"Of course," Ford mused as though lost in a daydream, "there is the legend of the Fountain of Youth. Just a myth, everyone says. Odd that I've never researched that."

Wendy stood up. "Sorry for unloadin' on you, Dr. Pines. Just had to tell somebody, and I don't want to hang this on Dipper. It'd worry him. As it is, I have to tuck it away in the back of my mind so he won't find out when we—when we hold hands or whatever. Have a good Fourth! See you guys later at the fireworks."

"Florida . . . ." Ford murmured. "What? Oh, fine, fine. Don't worry, Wendy. These things work out."

* * *

"So you're not really mad at me?" Teek asked Mabel.

"Not really," Mabel admitted. "I'm sorry I went off on you like that. I mean, I was scared to death because of my acrophobia, I'd been worried all day we'd lose Little Soos, I found a nearly naked girl in bed with you—it was just all my doubt and fear and worry coming out like that that made me seem so mad."

"But you were so optimistic the whole time!" Teek said. "Like you knew all along we'd get out fine!"

"That's my way of dealing with anxiety, I guess," Mabel told him with a shrug. They were standing a little apart from the crowd enjoying the barbecue, in the shade of the forest edge. "But, Teek! Kissing that guy!"

He squirmed. "I didn't _want_ to!"

Mabel nudged him. "How was it? Really?"

"Not . . . bad," Teek confessed. "For kissing a guy, I mean. I mean, you know, no tongues! Just lips. But it's not something I'm into!"

Grinning, Mabel challenged, "Show me how he kissed."

Teek looked around nervously. "Here?"

"Nobody's looking."

So . . . they stepped around a tree and Teek showed her. And then he showed her the difference when he kissed a girl.

And short as the kisses were, before the two pulled away from each other, Pacifica's voice broke in: "You guys! Oops! Hey, who's that—T.K.? OMG, you got _swag!_ New outfit! Mabel, you lucky girl! Mm. Lucky, lucky girl! Come here and let me get a good look, T.K.!"

"Hi, Pacifica," Mabel said, her smile frozen. "Where's Adam? You know, your boyfriend?"

"Around somewhere," Pacifica said carelessly. "Mom, Dad, and I just got back in town yesterday. Europe was _fabulous_. Hey, T.K., walk me over to the serving table and tell me what's good . . . . "

* * *

In the realm of the Goblin King, Jahrkves brooded in the throne room. He called Phlegm in. "Take a memo."

"Yes, sire." Phlegm was an ideal confidential secretary. He could neither read nor write, but he had a magical gift of transferring spoken words directly to paper, without their leaving the least impression on his brain.

The Goblin King put a meditative finger on his lips, and then said, "Ready? Good. Note to self: Next time, try to persuade the hero to stay, not the maiden. Might not be that bad."

Phlegm handed him the parchment with the memo on it and bowed himself out. Jahrkves read it, shrugged, and muttered, "Damn narrative conventions probably won't let me get away with it, but it might be worth a shot."

Bored and—yes, lonely, he snapped his fingers and started to change channels, trying to find something good on his crystal ball.

* * *

Stanford and Stanley Pines disappeared from the barbecue for a few minutes. They went down to the lab, and Stanford rummaged around in his underground library until he found an enormous atlas.

He opened it to a relief map of Florida—an old one, the book was published in the 1880s—and the twin brothers bent over it, Stanley looking interested but skeptical, Stanford stabbing the map with his forefinger and explaining why this, that, and the other place had been eliminated, but—"I'm beginning to suspect that this area just might have potential."

"I'm listening," Stanley said.

* * *

Wendy and Dipper found their way to the bonfire clearing. They kissed, of course. And when they did, they could read each other's thoughts:

_—Dipper, you have to trust T.K. Let him and Mabel have their summer romance. He's good for her, and she's good for him._

_I know, I know. I guess it's a lifelong habit, worrying about her. See, I don't want us to drift apart. I'm thinking of going on another mystery quest with her, you know, like we used to. Would you mind if it was just Mabel and me?_

_—Do I get to go on one with you later?_

_Later and for the rest of my life._

_—Deal. Just don't you get hurt, you hear me? And if you need me—_

_Got you on speed dial._

In the early afternoon, as they joined in the games and the laughter and the fun, Dipper said to Wendy, "It seems like it's been such a long day!"

"Enjoy it, man," Wendy told him as she tied their legs together—they were competing in the three-legged race. Mabel had just won the sack race, although she had run hard into a tree and although some of the other contestants were protesting. Unlike the others in the sack race, Mabel hadn't climbed into her sack but had pulled it down over her head.

"Well," Dipper said as he and Wendy stood up, "good luck. I'll probably get out of step and make you fall."

"Just cushion my landing, then," she said with a grin. "Ready?" They hobbled to the starting line.

And there were still more than eight hours of the Fourth of July to go. The fireworks were still hours away (if you didn't count as "fireworks" an earlier quick exchange between Pacifica and Mabel). It looked like the rest of the holiday would be smooth.

Oh, the three-legged race? Dipper and Wendy won first place, of course, by a wide lead. That's why they're over there around the corner of the Shack, hugging and kissing—nicely, politely, the way you do in public to celebrate.

People around them are cheering and clapping.

Everyone seems reasonably content, if not absolutely mad with joy, so perhaps this is a good place to leave them for a little while. Oh. Narrative convention—

And so they all lived happily, at least temporarily.

* * *

The End


End file.
